The Final Showdown

He saw that Igor was standing with James Farragut, Marcus Griffith and the men Daniel had seen in the mountains. Holding their batons high, they advanced on him with saddened frustration. Dmitri ran through his living room and through the back door and ran until he arrived at a quieter, more deserted part of town.

When Dmitri turned the corner of an alleyway, he saw Peter bruised and beaten and limping as Daniel’s friends chased him. Feeling torn about what to do, Dmitri stood paralyzed for a few moments and then ran past them. When he left the alley, he saw Daniel and several other federal officers running toward him. Turning around, Dmitri saw them enter the alleyway, and he immediately became curious about what would ensue. As the officers pulled off Peter’s attackers, Peter pulled a gun from his pocket that James had lent him. His seemingly plasticized and eerily neutral expression was gone entirely, contorted in anguish and struggle, as he shot at the federal officers multiple times, until Daniel shot him in the chest. After having watched this spectacle with gregarious sensitivity, a looming seriousness that tranquilized their nerves, Daniel’s friends ran off as the officers picked up Peter’s body. His wizened, triangular face that had died in fear and malice, was now like a rotting reptile.

Dmitri speechlessly hurried off and wondered what feats he might accomplish to uncover these mysteries. Since he was no longer plagued with this fiend, he felt that all could be restored in years instead of centuries. The lizard had been removed from his cage of pampered thoughts and hungers and banished to a realm elsewhere, in which the muses could attend to him. Dmitri wished that he could have watched him ascend, out of a dutiful sense of compassion that revolted his other sensibilities, the kinds that would have brought him to suicide within hours prior. But what would come of his brother? There was a profuse tendency among so many of these men, bred of philosophy, to be less deterred by the possibility of punishment, since they saw themselves as martyrs who persisted while all odds were against them. Dmitri began glancing around him and wondering whether Igor would show, but he didn’t see him. Luckily, the city had become far mellower and he could no longer hear any commotion. A small part of him that entertained magical thinking, proposed the likelihood that a collective consciousness had been hit so strongly by Peter’s passing that troubles everywhere ceased unanimously. He felt that a chapter had to end on an unrealistic note, which brought the meaning in its destiny full circle.

Dmitri noticed two plastic snowman statues outside one of the antique shops, where a Russian Blue cat wandered around and between them, licking the snow while looking at him. An old bearded man emerged from the shop and carried him inside, slamming the door in irritation as Dmitri continued walking. Symptoms of his lingering illness returned, and he vomited into the gray and white slush on the ground. He sat down on a bench and waited for his slight dizziness to stop, feeling such enough vigor to view the changes that surrounded him. The flurry of snow began as a supernal stasis his body, though he hallucinated shades of pink that flickered in clouds and windows. He nervously rocked back and forth as pedestrians moved away from him, searching for other benches.

When Dmitri heard the clock tower, he snapped back into reality, got up and struggled through the Christmas shoppers, hoping he wouldn’t see any clues of his nemeses: pasty flesh and pedant’s clothing. But was there was peace instead, which he somehow felt was undeserved for his pursuits. He was shameful about the virtuous things he had done. Igor’s fragileness cried for a likeminded sympathy, in spite of the evils it allowed. It leaned his selfish martyrdom on powerlessness, lending his unoccupied hands to anyone who passed him. Dmitri felt tempted to acquiesce to his desires, since he hoped so fervently for him to survive. He didn’t want to find him bludgeoned or stabbed somewhere before he reached his mansion. To calm himself, he went inside a bookstore and saw his father sitting with his friends, in a coffee shop near the bestselling novels. When he tried to say hello nothing came out, and he stood there transfixed and torn between staying and departing. He then went downstairs to see if there was any classic poetry to inspire him, but was only met with boring contemporary books about personal issues he took no interest in: marriage, relationships and drug addictions. They mimicked the slogans and inner narratives of each-other and brought him nothing more than tedium and rage. He was certain that there was something special and exhilarating waiting somewhere, especially in the climate woven by his own intelligentsia, the young rebels who had endured so much and were making their voices known.

Dmitri eventually succumbed and picked up a banal psychological thriller novel, which had a caricature of the red-haired nymph on its cover, resting on a Lilypad with a lollipop in her mouth. He dozed off as his delirium sometimes returned, and at one point he hurried to the bathroom. But the sickness ended by the time he reached the door, and he returned to his chair. The atmosphere became thick with private gossip and surprise, while parents held onto their children protectively. Katya then approached him, trying to stifle her tears.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked him.

Dmitri looked at her affirmatively, while his words failed to emerge.

As Dmitri and Katya walked home together, their thoughts seemed nearly aligned with each-other, with a sliver of distinction between them. They sometimes looked at each-other as if they were about to speak, with wise and furtive expressions that suggested mutual feelings. When they passed the snowman statues, they saw a light-brown rabbit running around with the cat while carolers sang outside the church, first in the minor and then in the major key. Meanwhile, Igor alternated between walking and running haphazardly through the streets, having heard from James about what had happened to his mentor, the essence of all he had desired and experienced. He suddenly wished to copycat Dmitri’s tactics, and hide in marriage and romance as a way to be comforted like a small boy who needed nurturing affection. The heartlessness of his escape would be what most frauds dreamt of, the space between action and inaction out of which disaster was avoided, and nothing worthy was ever attained.

         Igor wrung his hands as he limped through the narrow alley, having been shot in the leg by a protestor who was on neither the side of the mystics or Griffith Alliance. He was a depraved anomaly whose vicious and moonstruck expression suggested that he was from the fringes of this town and had been made from the uneducated culture of the poor whom the elites had exploited. Igor saw his own reflection in a puddle of melted ice, when he ascended into the animated, particularly metropolitan part of Ocean City. He was out of the muck he had left behind, in the worthless community he had owned for his own pleasure and spat out when academia had fully corrupted him, the rotting gold at the rainbow’s end at which his blood had run completely cold, without even traces of mercy and contentment. The mirror of the water was living proof, at which he turned away and proceeded, thinking back to when Daniel conceded that Igor reminded him of his father, even though he regularly kept these matters to himself. Something diabolical emerged when he emulated people of older generations, since its conformism was worsened by his own deranged tendencies.

         Igor saw one of the nymphs standing at the pond in front of the distant mountains, holding the ghost of one of the young boys who Peter had killed in prison. His golden blond hair haunted the freshness of his features that had somehow been rejuvenated in the hereafter, as he looked up at her in a kind of embraced helplessness that was enchanted by her immovable care.

Chapter Fifteen

         Two muses lay in the lemon grove while everyone else retired their day. One caressed the other’s hair as her semi-wakefulness made all seem ever more pleasant. Though this race of women always pulsed with epiphany, Griffith Alliance somehow believed that they did not have souls. A fox trotted through the sand toward them, having invaded their lush fortress with eager prods and awful inhalations, becoming raspier as the residual hallucinogenic toxins in the sea affected his lungs. It had been months after Daniel’s victory, and the mangos and pears dangling in the maritime climate wore patches of oozing nectar, as a large cavern spewed codfish from below the waves. Various pages from Peter Rawson’s diary that Christina had torn and tossed in rage two days ago, were scattered on the shore of oak trees and raspberry bushes, some slipping into the waves.

On the page drifting out the furthest, it said, Tonight, I felt like I could write out what was going on in me, as a way to take a step back from myself, and study it. Yet I feel like I can finally get this off my chest, is through some form of human contact, to keep my mind centered and rational, to keep it from veering off on horrible tangents. I’m beginning to realize that this would be impossible, since I’m not built for such a task. My objectivity continues to decrease as my joy increases, since my will power is incompatible with my inner life. Ha! Here I must stop myself because I am indulging. Now, I’ll be clear and honest with myself and you: I shut you out for a while, and refused to talk to you because you reminded me of what I was incapable of, the empathy, strength, decisiveness and will that I have suffered to keep up, but then I fail because of my own callousness. Even though I am sitting in prison, and have everything taken away from me, I feel the constant urge to take back the power I used to have, as if that’s possible. I want to rejoin society and dominate it again, with the help of my friends who destroyed my sense of self, and rebuilt it again in a new form. I became more and more desensitized from others. But I disguised this with the pretense of wisdom and intelligence, and I wished that I could just shut out the rest of the world, without the need for anyone else. I could just turn to people whenever I felt they were necessary, but otherwise, they meant nothing.

Meanwhile, the androgynous beings ran along the seabed with the finest agility, while smoke and dust rose in mushroom clouds that covered schools of salmon, as corpses were swept and toppled in the tides. These were the entities who had not been recruited into Griffith’s organization, and who instead remained among the wilderness and unwatched corners of society. As the beings began swimming to the surface, they saw a gigantic lotus peering down at them from the waves, with three eyes on each of its fleshy petals. This was a less developed manifestation of their species, whom the starlit water had given the air of an infernal sentry. In a network near one of the subaquatic, underground bases, medical personnel were attending to Scott, Andrew’s sixteen-year-old brother whose forehead was hooked up to a touch-sensitive machine. The kind of abdominal treatment he required was far more intricate than Dmitri and Daniel put together, since it involved injecting a blue liquid intravenously given the far more pervasive, respiratory impacts of his illness. This substance contained multitudes of microscopic devices in the forms of clear and transparent, rubber cells, responsible for fertility and liver function. The reproductive organs were in far greater danger than in most cases.

         In addition, the screen with wires attached to his forehead contained channels with energy emitted from the nearby facilities. One of the doctors, a girl with dark auburn hair and smooth skin, felt for any more abdominal lesions as the sea’s banging echoes began reverberating off the walls. He was then attacked by a vision that repeated his prison ordeal, in which Adam Rowe kept him strapped to a bed with ulcerous wounds forming within his stomach. Adam looked down at him as if he was tampering with Nature, in an experiment that took its course through inevitable causes that were partially outside his volition. Having been one Maxim’s patients and accustomed to the psychiatric sphere, Scott could read the difference between the temporary suspension of emotion and utter foreignness to it. He was undoubtedly witnessing the latter.

         “So why did you run away?” Adam asked.

         “W-What do you mean?”

         “I mean, from yourself. You had all these years ahead of you but sold yourself short by chasing happiness, instead of thinking about me or anybody else. That’s why you don’t know who you are. You let it all slip away, like I warned.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Yes, I do. You’re a criminal, a thief and a delinquent because—”

“I’m not prejudiced! I just want what everybody else wants.”

Scott grimaced and kicked as he ground his teeth.

“That’s what you keep telling yourself, and that’s what keeps you planted here.”

Scott struggled and begged with a kind of suffering that, at the time of the actual experience, Adam felt he had never seen, since it was pure desire and hopelessness instead of the whining and pleas of those whose abstractions kept them lying in a bed of laurels. What he had discovered more acutely than his fellow man, was that wealth enabled these meditations more than poverty.

After Scott’s vision ceased, the medical procedure was complete and he was released without any inquiries about erratic or spasmodic behavior. He had somehow managed to keep his delusions in utter privacy, a skill he felt was incongruous to their stark barrage of sensations, as he departed to the subway on his way to his appointment with Dr. Maxim Sokolov. When he arrived at his office, books were misshapenly placed on the shelf and a stuffed, taxonomic sparrow was lying on its side on Dr. Sokolov’s desk. Two security guards were standing at the back of the room, whom Scott hadn’t noticed at first. They were looking through smudged glasses at the sterile abyss to which this comedy had devolved. A stuffed goat head was hung above the vent in this den of habit and misery, and there was Dr. Sokolov seemed so lost in thought that he didn’t greet him. Instead, he launched into the matters he had wished to tell him all week, “The cult has disappeared, Scott. We have no idea where they’ve gone, and I don’t know how they are going to be prosecuted. I wish I could serve you and your family some justice, but this is starting to be out of my jurisdiction. I feel they’ve pulled a stunt that is beyond my grasp, and I am digging for a solution. . .”

“We should all just take a swig of cyanide now, and then we won’t have to worry about this any longer,” said Scott angrily. “Everybody! Every single one of us in the United States!”

“No, we’re going to handle things like the people we know we are, not that those nobodies who came before this whole movement got started,” said Maxim.

“What movement?”

“You should know by now how much my son’s mysticism has changed everything.”

Scott snorted. “I don’t see that at all. It seems like we’ve just got more of what I knew was gonna happen, but nobody listened to me. I’m tired! I don’t care about my life anymore! I’m done!” He got up and walked out of the office, as Maxim called for him.

As Scott made his way to the bar lounge, Daniel was celebrating his triumph there already, having laid his responsibilities to rest after they had delayed this anticipated ceremony, during which all his beloved people could unite in his boasts and quips that resurrected the gems from his former personality.

“It was priceless!” he exclaimed to Dmitri. “I felt like I died with him for a moment, as if I was dragging him away kicking and screaming. Except I knew I had something to return to, and nothing was really over.”

“I’ve had that feeling before,” said Dmitri. “That explains almost thirty years’ worth of my dreams.”

Daniel was surprised at Dmitri’s taciturn responses throughout the party, since he believed he would be more joyous and engaged in this historically monumental event. Several of the female mystics wore pale-blue makeup as they danced to the exotic, Armenian classical music.

“I wished I had been more with-it all along,” said Daniel. I feel like I had to wait until a disaster for me to take action. But I was too caught up in being skeptical about everything, and also too lazy to get involved. Now I got that garbage out of my system, I can lay low for a while and take stock of what’s going on, without getting in my own way.”

Staring into space, Dmitri said, “I was thinking . . . when I look back at Peter Rawson in my head, I just see a crazy old man raving in the streets. When he was alive, I was so obsessed with every twisted thing he said or did that I was like a dog jumping and barking at random shadows, without seeing the whole picture. I often wonder what I would see if he showed up at my doorstep now. I might laugh uncontrollably. I don’t know whether I’d be more or less frightened.”

Gulping down more of his beer, Daniel scanned the crowd for Dmitri’s models. The boats were moored in as European fans of Dmitri came to see his latest work, while the Russian Blue cat entered the garden from the harbor front. Rose’s gaping mouth was sometimes seen in the watery mirror of the sky, with her hair blowing in her shaded and pupil-less eyes. She was sometimes confused with a woman who swam below the surface, as if there was something unanimous and special in these appearances.

“I want to leave the country soon though,” said Daniel. “That’s what Miriam always talks about, and I guess I should take her word for it. I think there’s something in store for me out there, which is a lot better. I never thought I really belonged here in America. Yet I hated you and your values so much. You had that cultural touch of those places even after you moved away from them.”

“I wish more people thought that about me,” said Dmitri sourly, and walked away into the zenith of obsession.

Chapter Sixteen

         Griffith Alliance, in the midst of their travel into the ocean’s depths, repeatedly saw sloth-like and wretched things peeping out from small holes in the rocky masses of coral, giving the sensation that a clandestine destiny was stalking them from behind and ahead. Rose’s ghost frolicked among them miles away, as wispy configuration with legs that became more evident in motion. Peter Rawson’s spirit also walked in their midst, but he was unable to see them given the knots of self-serving reluctance that were disappearing in tiny stages of salvation. The greenery was a voice of the earliest era, in which masses of energy and psyche governed the primeval realms. Reconciliation and forgiveness hung in a place from which these feelings were so ancient that their causes couldn’t be traced, yet they made a slew of creators and followers.

It was 2 am and the submarine had been changed to self-automation, while the men of the new age hung around in their cubicles that were spread throughout the vast rooms and offices. A jar of smiley-faced, spherical candies of multiple colors was on Griffith’s desk as he sat with his cheek against his fist, writing reports of various events that had recently taken place, including the protests and Peter Rawson’s murder. As Adam Rowe slept in his chair near him, a fly buzzed around his neck and then landed on his forehead, but he didn’t even flinch or make the slightest movements. A few minutes later, his head tilted back and his mouth became somewhat ajar, revealing some of his seemingly false, perfectly blanched teeth.

         The organization had already formulated their escape and were heading to a subterranean network in St. Petersburg where some of Maxim’s rivals were collaborating with trying to erase his psychiatric theories from literature, mostly involving his efforts to stop the ostentatious and deviously fascistic revolution that Griffith was stirring up. Maxim believed that many of the victims of he treated were gravitating toward it, instead of their aversion intensifying or imploding like they had during the year Dmitri was born. These rivals were priests and aristocrats who had laid the foundations for the cult’s paradigm, though they never directly participated in it since there were too many differences that set them apart, as they wished to avoid cross-contamination of lifestyles. These men who resided in St. Petersburg were not keen on self-soothing asceticism that drank from the breasts of ease and security, justifying means with exceptional ends. Honest barbarism was their main course of action, though they admired the elements of liberalism in the organization’s practices. Griffith Alliance planned to work in a society among their network, where they knew they couldn’t be found since this place was unheard of and was embedded in the deepest tunnels on the planet.

         As James Farragut drank his small, decaffeinated cup of coffee in his office on the top floor, he was in the mood to impress his colleagues with his longwinded drivel, beginning with, “I think this is the place where we were always meant to be. Even if we’re not on the same page with those people about everything, we’re certainly a step ahead of the game and we can be of tremendous assistance to them. I want to show them that underneath our harsh tactics, we have the softness of poets and artists who have been treated as these kinds of groups often have by history. We’ve been thrown against the wall so many times that we’ve become numb about its effects, and we’ve forgotten ourselves.” James looked outside the window and into the watery landscape around them. He pointed to the dryads silhouetted in the swaying forestry, and said, “By destroying their world, we’re setting a firm standard, and making a bold statement to ensure human beings don’t become tempted and distracted.”

“You’ve got that right,” said Dr. Morrison. “I’m tired of the United States. I’m glad we’ve found something so much more fulfilling. I think that we’ll have better luck from now on.”

James got up, concluding with, “It’s time for me to go to bed and mull this over, since we don’t have much time to clean up this mess. I’m pretty confident no one will find us, but I have to be extra cautious.”

They said goodnight and he departed almost soundlessly.

         As Adrian lay in bed with his wife after getting back from the lounge, he was certain that the country’s troubles had come to an end. Judge Donovan, who had given Peter such a light sentence a while ago, had been fired and replaced with one of Maxim’s colleagues, Ronald Voight, who had been on close call for the dramatic changes that had avalanched, and he was ready to take on these thugs. But Adrian also wondered why the process had suddenly become so delayed, since like Daniel and Dmitri, he hadn’t yet heard of Griffith Alliance’s disappearance. He had just heard that the law was taking these matters far more seriously than they ever had. Their Achilles Heel had been punctured with a reverse counterculture, and he wished he had been there to see Peter’s bloody demise. Katya’s hand on his neck almost made no impression on his petrified and ecstatic fantasies, in which Peter’s cries were drowned out by Adrian’s overstressed perception. Even when Katya tried to get his attention, he turned over on his to keep pursuing these horrors repeatedly as he felt that this might keep him from fulfilling his worst desires in reality. Though he knew he would never harm any innocent people, he still felt that his ambitions could become more misdirected than he wanted if didn’t keep them in check.

         “Adrian, what’s wrong?” Katya asked.

         “I’m fine. I’m just working some stuff out.”

         “That’s your default. You always say that. I’m never sure whether you’re telling the truth.”

         “Yes, I am.”

         “Well, how about you just talk to me about what’s going on with you. Let me in on everything. You’ve been mute all week. You’re driving me crazy.”

         “I feel like Dmitri did when he tried to steal that book from the monastery when he was a kid. I’m just as out-of-control as I was when I was his age.”

         “What makes you say that?”

         “I dunno.” Adrian sighed with frustrated laziness. “I guess I’m just recovering from all this mayhem that’s been happening. Maybe I’m losing it.”

         “I’m sure you’re fine,” she said while stroking his hair. “You just need to get some perspective on things, that’s all. You just need to be able to take a step back, like Dmitri did to get out of the mess he was in.”

Adrian fell asleep as she was talking, which she realized a few moments later. She turned off the light and listened to the ocean where the nomads persisted in their adventures and enlivened the values of folklore through their song and music that rejected civilization’s regressions. Hunger and thirst were not known in this place outside the needs of the flesh.

Chapter Seventeen

In Dmitri’s last appointment that marked the final stage of his recovery, he was instructed to lie inside a small room as the x ray searched for anything left, and Dr. Abigail sat beside him. Nothing was found so far, as Dmitri watched the blue and transparent images flash across the ceiling. The x ray sometimes magnified microscopic activity where the bodies of various nanotechnological entities swam about in his blood stream, colorless and elastic and featureless with their humanoid bodies twisting and contorting in their efforts. There came a time in this process when Dr. Abigail was a mere mask of beauty, without love, hate or even indifference visible in her expression, since focus and diligence became her. She intimidated him in the way he often desired, the times when she was without self-awareness or the social instinct to impress or convince. She was herself only, leaving a photographic shell of persistence.

It was proven by the end of that has entirely cured, at which he looked at her in amazement and disbelief. He felt that this had come too soon, since the delusions of his abused history still claimed that he had to surpass muck, fire and water to prove himself eligible for what everyone else had without question. Why did he feel he had missed a step, and was going to fall through a crack from which he might never return? Nonetheless, in spite of this wasteful fretting, he was elated about this breakthrough and he thanked her for all her assistance. He left his doubts at the door of this facility, expecting their imprints to be bound here with the same inanity as Peter. Imagining him in his absence brought an obvious picture to all else, which followed in his crimson footsteps.

But when Dmitri left, he found his brother lying on the sidewalk across the street, bloodied and battered with automatonlike vengeance behind the sun shining on his spectacles. He was motionless as Dmitri ran over to him and checked his heartbeat and pulse, discovering that he was dead. Panting, Dmitri slowly came to the conclusion that he had been killed by protestors, as several people gathered around them and police got out of their cars.

“What happened?! How did this . . . no . . . I knew this wouldn’t . . .”

Dmitri’s conclusions were confirmed by several hysterical pedestrians who had been subjected to these catastrophes for the two years.

“I thought that these people had been brought to justice!” Dmitri screamed as his voice faltered in mournful fury. “I thought it was over! What was my brother doing out here, walking around as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed?!”

         “Nothing has,” one of the officers said as they examined the body. “The cult has disappeared! No one knows where they’ve gone, and it looks like he stayed behind for reasons we don’t know. We’ve gotten a lot of reports of him walking around this neighborhood for days, talking to himself and seemingly having gone without any sleep. He was hassling people on the subway and getting into fights, and we’ve had to keep an eye on him.”

         Dmitri hyperventilated as he changed from pity and devastation to venom toward Igor, and he kicked the body that once housed this ungrateful coward. Without being able to hold back, he ran off and left everyone else to handle what was left, and without even a plan of where he was headed. The dial of his selfhood had been muted to total surrender and incapacity, as if he might become an invalid at any moment, coveting and hitting and lurking as Igor did before his elimination. Dmitri was beyond wanting sympathy or affection at any point in the future, since these things would from now on be insults to his mistrustful retirement, expressions of things that he thought were useless customs meant for show. He wanted to give up his career and provide no care or thought to anyone, feeling that he needed more self-attention than he ever allowed himself, a goal that was sealed when he departed into the mountains, planning to return to town at dusk. The chorus of women awaited him ahead, but he knowingly deviated this path.

Chapter Eighteen

The muses gathered with sultry poise in the cemetery, as the gray and jaundiced souls of the deceased stood behind them in infamy that they began to savor in its endless allure, attracting others only to be repelled in surprise and indignation. The sloth-like men had scars across their faces, and bloodshot eyes that seemed to glow when peeping through their famished skin. In a state between this world and the next, one of the muses lay on the river’s surface, looking into it as a deer ran by her. As dawn arrived, her hair emitted an aroma of diverse layers, which even these connoisseurs of natural art were unfamiliar with. Rose sometimes playfully sat on her back and imitated the expressions of the stern sentries who paced around nearby, checking for any obnoxious histrionics among the louts who saw this place as a joke to be spat upon. Solemnity to them was what the crucifix was to the Devil. To the drunkards, Rose’s ghost may have been nothing more than these matters, in spite of her disruption of the unremarkable, and her heresy against continuity.

A rainbow refracted from her phosphorescent hair, as she hopped along the large rocks and the women discussed what issues had come about recently.

“I think this is given us clear enough of a message,” said the youngest as she stood near Rose, who became respectfully militant and focused on their discourse. “Dmitri’s brother was capable of something that I didn’t know was possible for people of such low caliber, the ability to see his own ignorance. . . even though that never really motivated him to do anything differently. But now, everything’s fallen apart. I see Igor continuing to do what he did in his last days. The difference is that here no lies are believed, and he can’t pull the kinds of stunts he did when he was alive.”

“I am conflicted,” another woman said. “I don’t know whether rectifying these circumstances requires stepping out of people’s affairs more often, since whenever we are seen we’re painted with whatever superstitions or expedient definitions that the masses want to give us. At least if we lead the course of things inconspicuously, we’ll cater to their comforts far more easily. It’s time we stop putting ourselves on display, since that allows us to either be seen as savages or gods. Those things do not even seem that different from each other when examined very closely, which is why I want to get beyond those judgments. I want to be just as free as anyone else.”

“I think that is the best course of action,” said the youngest. “We don’t have any other choice. We must proceed stealthily.”

The women began walking toward the valley.

“I feel that this is the cleverest thing we have attempted,” she continued. “We can exist undisturbed, which would be the most peculiar concept for Griffith’s men who believe that suffering is the way to perfection. We can safely say that their struggles are not going to define or affect us.”

         They felt the mossy stones beneath their feet change to dirt and concrete, as they advanced on their new oasis. An owl hooted as it retreated to its nest and the mist was heavy against their supple bodies. Their garments were caught on the branches of bushes where bleeding white berries oozed with nameless intoxicants. The sun had risen, and Daniel was visible in the distance, strolling about with cheerful air of unsophistication.

The women looked back twice to see if any affirmation might appear in this wilderness, some shrill sound, mark or sign that would seal their decision. But they were instead rejected by the gloomy glances of the deceased, who made their way to the city while knowing they would never be seen.

Chapter Nineteen

After Griffith Alliance arrived at the station that intersected with the passageways, Marcus Griffith looked sadly and awkwardly at the rusty, eroded stone walls around him, giggling to himself. These walls reminded him of the times when he kept Dmitri in solitary confinement, suspecting him of being a closet profligate who would have perished without his guidance. A glass sphere floated on the surface of the deep basin, from which the submarines emerged and parked in the various lots that led into the network. Inside the center of the sphere was a thermometer in the form of blue light, in case of chemically induced temperature changes that sometimes occurred, alerting the facilities to danger. Nurses and doctors curiously glanced through windows at this gang of strangers, who seemed to have walked out of some older time, a chic underworld that had dwindled away. Their immodesty was comparable to an uninvited guest, ready to challenge a witless host with jabs and tricks.

When Griffith Alliance entered the subterranean city, Valeria, one of their nine-year-old victims, tugged on James’ arm with a kind of tedium in her implorations, as if her plateaued and unexpressed misery was trying to communicate to itself, and show its presence to others.

“Just take it easy,” said James sheepishly. “Just leave the hard work to us. No more wild goose chases this week, alright? We’ve dealt with enough from your family, and we’re gonna put that behind us. You’re not one of them. You deserve a lot better.”

“I wanna go home!”

“Cut it out now! You wanna embarrass me in front of all these people?! Come on!”

“I thought you were gonna help me! That’s what you said, remember!”

“Shut up! I’m warning you!” James shouted, raising his fist as if he was about to punch her, while they entered the city. “When Peter and I consummated our love for you, that was a rebirth, a way to get you grounded for everything else. If you can’t accept that, you’re a lost cause, trust me. There’ll be nothing else for me to say.”

         “I’m not ready!”

         “Yes, you are! Stop telling yourself that!”

         The first level of the city was filled with medical offices and equipment, as well as supply stores and rooms with technicians staring at holographic screens. After they took the elevator ten floors deeper, they went through a tunnel of veiled women who brushed past some of them with a hinted vindictiveness. Very few medical personnel wandered around, and the only ones there were masked with turquoise plastic windowlike shields on their thick and leathery attire. They walked with zealous but unwieldy gaits, which came from age and poor health that was never counterbalanced by their fitness.

         Business districts and studios holding raves and affluent parties, were lined across the hall that stretched on for a mile as menial workers came to and fro, some pushing large dollies that carried light-brown, cloth bags. One of these men was eccentric character who Dmitri had seen in his dream, sitting and smoking in the wine cellar. In one of the stalls that Griffith’s clan passed, boars stood in the darkness and ate piles of trash that were deposited through channels connected to corrupt medical facilities, where allies of Griffith’s organization worked and disguised their hallucinogenics in fake medications. A smoky smell emerged from these stalls, as the animals stood in fateful unity.

They then passed a gentile and expensive diner with a jazz band playing, and red carpeted floors. A smell of spice, herbs and meat trailed from outside the door, and the clatter of metal plates was heard from the kitchen, giving romance and hardiness to this imperfect paradise. After this came the office building where Griffith planned to work as their new administrator. The moment that they entered, they saw clergymen pushing beggars out of the exits a few feet away, while a bearded priest stood behind the main desk, tracking this growing catastrophe to determine whether or not to intervene.

“This place isn’t yours!” one of the beggars shouted before he was kicked down the stairs. Valeria tearfully watched and then looked up at the pedants who held her hostage, knowing that she was eternally barred from her friends and family. After they took the elevator to Griffith’s office, she almost collapsed but James saved her as she was less than an inch from the floor, while the rest looked at her as if, through some epileptic monstrosity, she had entered from another dimension. The effects of their actions had been separated from their established meaning, which was a blessing and curse of the holy rhetorician. From then on, in the years that loomed irrevocably over Ocean City, Valeria was held hostage while the organization was never found. Dmitri found a hunger for relationships again, six years into his devastation and listlessness. But he had given up art and poetry and, as a reprisal for Igor’s past sins, he spent his time enjoying his own luxury, indulging in food and drink and refusing to work at all. He wanted back all the time that Igor had torn him from limb to limb, while idly simpering and stammering and relaxing in his mansion.

Adrian and Daniel were enraptured by this hilarity, though they felt incredibly sorry for everything that had happened. They sometimes showed up at his home in the evenings to comfort him, bringing him champagne and sitting with him on the balcony. One night, Daniel said to Dmitri, “You can’t spend the rest of your life like this. What do you plan on doing? Is there anything you value the most? You used to talk about all these things you’d fight for. What happened to that?”

Dmitri caught onto the timid, failed generosity of these words, which Daniel had tried to represent as merely kind and encouraging. Cheerfully lighting a cigarette, Dmitri said, “I don’t wanna think about that now. Frankly, I feel I’m less of an asshole when I’m not held accountable for anything. I want peace and quiet. I don’t wanna any more cucks or brainiacs bothering me.”

“You know . . .” Daniel hesitated for a moment, “Dmitri, I completely understand. I used to feel the same way. I never wanted to grow up, but, here I am.”

Dmitri changed the subject as he blew a ring of smoke, “That was the kind of thing I always decided, but I knew I could throw it away if I wanted to.”

“So, what? You’re just gonna throw yourself into the gutter now?”

“No,” Dmitri said. “I’ve already done that. This, however, is the most normal I’ve ever been.” He smiled as he detected a coconut perfume, hovering in the air.

THE END

Illusions and the Hereafter

They were snapshots of the entities darting by in rural parts of Ocean City, in which the dark glances of swine met the gaze of these maidens, while standing at their troughs in brazen quietness, seemingly waiting for something or someone.

“Daniel Schroder is the only victim who hasn’t fallen for these kinds of delusions,” said Dr. Abigail. “He’s had others but not these. He’s always been a fox, very clever and not easily convinced of anything. However, one thing he’s got wrong is his view of these women. He believes that they are wholly misrepresented by these manic visions. But in reality, they have some of the traits that are shown in people’s biased mental projections. But they do not play the role of angels, as they are portrayed in folklore. They are lost wanderers like all those people below, who rely on the cultural sustenance of our world, giving them status through the praise of superstitious or religious people.” Dr. Abigail showed her another photo, in which one of these women lay asleep on a sandy shore, wearing a dark-blue babushka. Andrew glanced over at it with a soulless curiosity. All that convulsed within him had been tainted with experience, wrenched and drained and bent in erratic directions.

Chapter Nine:

As Peter sat in his cell, alone and no longer graced with that recreant’s company, his inner and outer voice became one and the same, the monotone of twilit consciousness that finally admitted its own heartlessness, when forced to reverberate back to him and mirror his true image. Chopin’s Funeral March repeated in pangs of indifference. Beside the bed he saw Anastassya with that feline look, which puritan men like him despised and wayward men loved. She seemed to be reading his intentions with bookish seriousness, as if she wished to engage in a battle of wits that merged sadism and flirtation. When Peter lunged at her after moments of ponderous despair, she vanished and he hit the wall. His disorientation was ceaseless from then on, in the night’s taunts and jabs.

“Why do you continue to torment me like this? You don’t even exist! What do you want from me?!”

Anastassya’s voice said, “To use your terminology, I want you to come to terms with yourself Peter. I can’t bear this any longer. I[LT1]  am a muse, a spirit who was sent here for your sake, and in the world I come from, I watch the souls of your dead victims mourn their departure from the Earth, and your vanity that sent them spiraling into madness before they died—

“This is nonsense, Anastassya! Let me be! How dare you come here and tell me how to live!”

“I can only guide you. I can’t force you to rehabilitate yourself.”

Peter sighed and said, “I guess we will never understand each other. But you will always be following my every step, hiding near me and making ripples in my thoughts and feelings, like some kind of parasite.”

“You will bring about your own demise. I’m not going to linger around and watch that happen.”

Peter felt her hand brush past his neck, though he saw no visible evidence of her presence. Its sensation caused him to chuckle agitatedly, with a nervously merry look that melted into deviousness. He became startled by his own reflection in the moonlit window.

“This can’t be real,” he whispered. “Somebody tell me this isn’t. He desperately leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor, sitting and slouching in defeatism and confusion. He hoped he would never feel her flesh again.

“There’s nothing left for me now.”

In the morning, Peter’s meal was interrupted by his wife Christina who stormed over to him, clumsily escorted by one of the officers.

“Ugh, what now? I don’t want hear the same sob story again.”

Christina retorted, “Why do I even bother? This is absurd.

          “Look, Christina, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Please leave me alone!”

“Rose was just a human being like you, and yet you saw her as an existential threat, as if she had so much power over you. You thought the same about Evelyn.”

“I didn’t believe she had any power. Do you really think she meant anything to me? You remember Evelyn, don’t you? She was quite a character: the way she batted her eyelashes, sighed and joked with me about personal matters as if she was an old friend. If Jezebel was alive today, that’s exactly how she would be. I never knew what she wanted or what she was thinking. I always sensed she was trying to manipulate me.”

“How?”

“That I couldn’t pinpoint. But of course, I never said anything. I managed to hide my disgust and behave civilly. Yet I always felt this strange urge to hurt her, whenever she spoke to me. I think it was that voice she used; she was like a deranged little girl who was desperate for my attention. I could tell she was up to something, which was the same way I felt about Rose. She was also an intense, fervent critic of my New Age organization, like all those entitled middle-class pricks who run away from unconventionality.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Peter! The real reason why you’re all feared, is because you’re a criminal gang! You and your gang of degenerates were raping women and children; that’s what she was raising awareness about! But you think anyone who calls you out on your depraved crimes, is not progressive enough, especially if she’s rich and upper-class! You guys call yourselves rebels, and act like you’re a bunch of saviors who are gonna change humanity! But you’re the biggest tyrants in the country!”

“Trust me, she was going to find some way to sabotage me, just like Dmitri and everyone else.”

“And what did Dmitri do to you?”

Ignoring her question, Peter continued, “To keep myself safe, Griffith and I used confinement due its sensory deprivation, to ensure that Dmitri would disassociate and lose his dependence on others outside our circle, as well as on himself. I needed to set the kind of boundaries that Dmitri was never taught, since his emotions were indulged and encouraged up until then, since his parents saw these feelings as the mark of an artist. But discipline was something he was never provided.”

“Once you’re done spewing jargon, can I interject? How much longer am I gonna have to wait before I can offer my perspective?”

“Shut up! Let me finish—shit, now I’ve lost my train of thought.”

Christina snickered. “Maybe that’s a good thing. You think way too much. That’s why you can’t keep your mouth shut. You’re full of ideas just bouncing off the walls. No wonder you became a charlatan. Instead of all this rambling, don’t you have anything meaningful to say to me? Can’t you feel remorse? Aren’t you aware of how deeply you broke my trust and faith in you? All these years, you’ve never let me in on anything that’s going on inside you. Everything was halfhearted, condescending bullshit. All the principles you have said you believe in: benevolence, kindness, wisdom and self-knowledge, have somehow been conveniently inapplicable when it comes to you.[LT2]  I should have trusted my instincts about you the moment I met you. You were such a creep. How could anybody trusted you? I feel like I’ve been used by a lunatic who’s escaped from the asylum, because he realized that he couldn’t run it. I mean, who the hell do you think you are? Why did you demand that I give you so much care and attention all these years? I always tried to serve you. What did you ever do to serve me?”

“I serve no one,” Peter replied, as if it was the most cutting-edge phrase ever said.

“Well, good for you. I hope that works out for you.”

“Don’t give me that smart-alecky bullshit, Christina. I’m trying here, okay? But I am constantly told that I’m delusional, and that I’m trying to gaslight everyone else.”

“But that’s exactly what you’ve done all these years. You tried to make me think that I was blind or irrational. Your vanity amazes me! Aren’t you embarrassed? Don’t you feel any shame? The farther we got in our marriage, the more erratic you got. All the times I ran to you for comfort and advice, you were checked out, distant. And whenever I argued with you to wake you the hell up, you were either calm and unfazed, or extremely hostile, to the point that I feared for my safety. But I always felt you had the potential to turn around, which was what exasperated me the most. I thought I had sometimes seen glimmers of compassion in you, but you stifled them like they made you uncomfortable. Please tell me that you’ve thought about my feelings just a little bit. I’m not asking for much.

“I guess you hide all this hysterical idiocy from everyone else, and save it for me.” An inhumanity almost reptilian flashed across his face.

“So this is what it’s come to. After all this, after all your apparent remorse that you expressed during the court hearings, and after all the time I’ve painstakingly set aside for you: the therapy sessions trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with your mind, the series of inquiries about why you were going off the walls and refusing to return anyone’s calls. I wished that I had seen this coming.”

Walking away with a peeved, hurt expression, he retorted, “There’s nothing you could have done to stop me, even if you had.”

“I guess I should get going. I won’t torture myself anymore. There’s no point to this conversation.” Christina stormed off while getting apish, unpleasant looks from some of the prisoners.

Chapter Ten:

After Daniel returned home, he was inspired by what he couldn’t distinguish as a whim or yearning, since it struck him in moments of such brightness and carelessness. It bubbled up with portentous urgency, mixed with joy and excitement to meet what shaped him in all his strengths and vices. He immediately began strolling to the rural patch of livestock and lesser known literary figures, on the outskirts of Ocean City. This was where all those photographs had been taken of the material, biological muses whom human quacks had held to such high esteem. Was it some mental disease in the bourgeois community, which made them engage in pitiable garbage? Daniel wondered whether they had nothing better or more important on their hands. He wanted to reach the bottom of these issues that plagued everyone, and see what he could muster. Was self-reinvention ever possible? Would the answers lie in meeting his demons face-to-face? He began to suspect that these women were criminals as well, and part of a cabal even greater than the current conspiracy.

         The moment he reached this nocturnal landscape, and was surrounded by the sound of crickets, he already felt a woman’s gaze. He then noticed a conglomerate of men standing a few feet away from him, sharing self-entitled looks of exhaustion. On their vapid expressions, their five-o’clock shadows were unseemly and wicked, uncouthness more poignant than any class, high or low, could specify. They scowled when a muse passed through the crowd, matching one of the photos Daniel had seen: the bright-red hair and startling mental presence. Daniel stumbled backward in shock, as all became synchronized within him: the past, present, future and the Earth. She was the woman who he had seen here at the age of sixteen, and she hadn’t aged since then.

Daniel expected the men to pounce on her immediately but instead they slowly followed her from behind, while some of them tried to look as if they didn’t notice her. In their efforts to seem preoccupied with other thoughts and considerations, they looked around with a nonspecific air of curiosity. Daniel suddenly couldn’t tell whether they were men or teenagers. Daniel tried arduously to dismiss what he saw, as he veered toward the woods. But something else was brewing that he thought was never possible, a change on many levels that his faculties understood as physiological and emotional, while more primal forces worked below them. The sight of this nymph was burnt hopelessly into his thoughts, attacked by an uncomfortable shift on his horizons that drew nearer and nearer, slowly becoming more pleasant and familiar. In his loins and brain, he felt what Dmitri had described to him while he was much younger, and that his atheism had somehow prevented him from grasping, as if all was inseparable in the human condition. The woman’s appearance aroused him in ways that seemed predestined for this exact moment, at this exact time. Only the paranormal could excite these sensations, since it sounded out the basis of all his worst terrors: the unknown, the controlled and the uncontrollable, which were wrapped within the works of religion and witchcraft. The sensuality of Griffith Alliance seemed thousands of times uglier, when contrasted with this present novelty.

When he travelled further, he became reticent to turn back since he was wounded quite pleasurably by the blunt force of these realities: the spectacle of new feelings. He began seeing crowds of these women wandering through the mountains, some seemingly asleep while others hawkish, with gracious bashfulness guiding their nimble steps. The mists thickened as the prison unthawed inside him, and he began to wonder whether he was being deceived. His bitterness had been softened so greatly that he felt like pinching himself in disbelief. He was hesitant to accept this voiceless invitation, into a territory that he admittedly had deprived himself of for no reason other than revelry, with the belief that he was invincible to all social consequences.

Daniel saw the clan of nymphs he remembered from Dmitri’s tales, disappearing into the silhouetted masses ahead. What was in store for him now?

Phantoms with silver condensation to their breaths, were scattered throughout the landscape, and the man-womanish beings came in small packs from the hills beyond. Daniel joyfully followed three muses down a stone stairwell, until they reached a room he recognized from pictures taken by police officers who had been investigating the current regime. It was a room with several wooden benches, on which monks from Griffith Alliance sat in prayer, while Marcus Griffith stood in front of them. This was the cult whose existence Daniel’s trauma had denied, and whom Dmitri’s father his own family about, while Igor wrote him off as a fool. On the stage with the organ and podium, one of the beings opened his robe and revealed three eyes on his chest, an anomaly rare among his species. One of the pallid, delirious strangers who roamed these subterranean tunnels, burst through the door while his screams wavered to a high pitch.

“Leave my family alone!” he bellowed. “My limits are in plain sight. I can’t go on any longer!

For fear he would be ensnared in some greater disaster than he was previously, Daniel hurried off and broke into a run that caused the breeze to whistle in his ears. When he arrived back in the metropolis, he panted as he acknowledged his poor fitness, glancing around as if consolations lay in the arbitrary secrecy of others, while he was now the shellshocked beggar from elsewhere. He then noticed his friends standing at the bus stop, and he ran over to them and debated with himself about whether to be honest about his experiences, and whether the ridicule was worth his agonies. He wanted to boast about the wholeness he attained, and what it had opened wide to his myopic self. Yet he felt this was shameful, and he kept quiet for a few moments as he looked at them, who furrowed their brows at his hell-worn appearance.

Chapter Eleven:

Maxim was one of the mystic protestors, who often felt that Daniel held a potential that was squashed by his propensities. Daniel’s sardonicism already showed great merit and insight, but ill-informed compulsions repeatedly compressed it into neediness, gaining popularity among many shallow friends, less inclined to ponder these distinctions. They were taken in by him, without helping him cultivate what was there. They left all that behind, wailing in either pain or hyperawareness. Yet now, Daniel felt ready to take flight through Maxim’s aid and stability, though he despised him for his artistic and spiritual sensibilities. Maxim’s balding scalp and ingratiatingly eager stance, gave him the air of a charlatan guru. But tender compassion leaked through these attributes, gaining Daniel’s trust in ways that didn’t require love or admiration. He suddenly felt no qualms about immersing himself, without the antics of his own internal critic.

They were sitting in a coffee shop, while Daniel sat with a hilarious look of sheepishness, while also displaying bravado about his escape from his predicament, which he had worried would become far worse given his dooming competition. Yet he was enraged about Peter’s cheap and ungodly sentencing. The morning, in some respects, malnourished his heart in its lack of time and purpose, the evening fuel to become a renegade of new heights and humiliating quips for fools. But in other respects, the wake of the day brought humble determination.

“How are you?” Daniel asked Maxim with boredom.

“Alright. I can’t say it’s been wonderful,” Maxim snorted. “We’re finding out more and more about this guy, and . . . well I’m not even going into detail about what he’s done. You’re gonna have to ask Dmitri about that.”

“Well, I know what kind of animal he is,” Daniel said in a debonair tone. “What he did to Rose Bellamy . . . well, let’s put it this way, if he had done to that to my life, I would have become someone else entirely. I wouldn’t even recognize myself anymore. . . What else do you know about him?”

“There’s something new on the horizon, and everyone’s hysterical about it: now it’s been proven that Griffith Alliance is indeed a cult—a band of New Age degenerates, to be exact.”

“Yeah, I know. I think I remember seeing one of those beings from the organization when I was kid, when I was in that prison cell. . . Things are coming back to me now. I can’t believe this.” Tears were running down his face. “If this is about counterculture, what are they trying to achieve with this look and style? I think everyone in that cult is a bunch of morons, who enjoy adding meanings to these stupid-ass things. What do they think they have to fight against anyways? After what they did to me and my family, they should all be hung! I’d like to watch that some day! But I’ll probably never live to see that! My health can’t take much more of this!” Daniel looked down and regained his patience and solidarity.

Maxim put his hand on his shoulder and said, “We’re trying our best to get this all sorted out. I wish I knew how long this will take. It seems like they’ve got a pretty firm grip, and they’ve got plenty of federal officers on their side, unfortunately.”

“One thing I’ve often considered,” Daniel said hesitantly, “—since my job doesn’t seem to serve me in any way, is that I just become a federal officer myself. I’ve had enough wasting away. I need to do something more meaningful.”

“Well, I can help you train to become one, if that’s what you truly want,” Maxim said. “But you have to take it seriously. No more of this trash that you throw on yourself.”

Daniel shook his head and said, “I guess that should be the turning point for me. Everyone else has had something that has bettered them, and made them think more carefully, while I’ve watched my own little world go by. I’m successful but I feel I could be more.”

“Well, if that’s what you’ve decided, I’m more than happy to help you,” Maxim said. “I think you’ve got the mental agility for this kind of work. If really wanted to be, you could become careful and discerning, and quick on your feet. You’re already smart enough as it is. You’d just need to become physically much stronger.”

Daniel took Maxim’s word and spent months of training, eventually weening off his addictions. The emergence of his sexual being the other night, protected his motivation from being swallowed by idle self-justification. His contempt for mysticism faded, and was replaced with a dedication to the Greek model of mind and body, the musculature that resembled the aesthetes of history. Meanwhile, Monica Hallworth been receiving reports of inexplicably broken bases, and other suspicious sightings that she pondered endlessly. Several employees had seen the man who Adrian encountered at seventeen, and had kept envisioning while he drank and tried to escape from his existence. But when her employees witnessed him, he was wearing a yellow suit with a fresh bloodstain a little larger than his head, on his upper back. While he strolled through the passageways, the Nordic woman who Dmitri and his friends had seen, was clinging onto his arm. She was begging him to give her another chance, for an unknowable reason. She was wearing a long-sleeved purple shirt, and jeans that were ripped all over, and she had the slight smell of alcohol. But in spite of her pleas, the man had a fishlike blankness that Dmitri would have known too well. This sighting always occurred a few minutes before one or more employees came across a broken base, just like the other sighting in which the man accompanied a little girl. She looked about four, and she followed him with a zombified gait, as she sometimes glanced at him with a trepidatious reverence.

During Peter Rawson’s last weeks in jail, the most intense subjectivism that ever set the country’s stage came careening into the wicked alliance, while all its men toyed with old definitions and loosened them to their advantage. Cruelty was coined as the erasure of barriers, the forms of traditionalism that married aggressors to their liberties, clutching relentlessly. One midnight, James, Marcus Griffith and Evelyn were in basement of the monastery, in front of the spiraling stairwell that led to the attic of experiments and artifacts. Evelyn’s nose was bloodied as she tried to open the door, and pounded her fists on it. Her statuesque physique had thinned and faded, and the new age had plastered itself over all her prior glories.

“Somebody help! Set me free!” She eventually gave up and cried.

Ignoring her, James said to Griffith, “Isn’t it obvious Marcus? The police caught Peter Rawson, simply because he was too stupid to conceal his crimes, unlike the rest of us. We[LT3] , the rest of the cult escaped the grasp of the law, because we were smart. We made sure to take liberties with these kids in places that no one had access to, which no one could see, like in these rooms and passageways for instance.”

“That’s not the only factor,” Griffith replied. “We were also much stronger and more persistent than he was.”

“Well, I definitely disagree with you on that. No one fought harder and fell harder than he did. He’s a unique kind of tough. He intellectualizes his crimes even more intensely than the rest of us, which gives him a prudence that I deeply admire.” He paused. “I feel that we’ve lapsed in our development. We were cowardly in having hid so much of ourselves from society. So what if none of the law is on our side anymore? Let’s not run from it any longer. Let’s embrace it, and try to get John and Radcliffe, those federal officers on our side again[LT4] . As long as they support us, we’ll never be prosecuted no matter how hard our victims fight in court, just like it was in the past before they were brainwashed and turned against us.”

“Let’s not be too hasty in our decisions either. We must be as discreet as possible. Otherwise we won’t survive.”

“But we must get those federal officers on our side, so that we can enhance the cult’s power, without any worries that we will be brought to that artificial construction of justice that everyone talks about. See, that is the downside. We have to be subjected to the establishment, and all these follies, and that if we don’t submit to them we are sadistic and simpleminded.”

“That’s enough talk. What should we do now? Are there any other alternatives, which will substitute the agony that we have suffered all these years?”

“What pain have we suffered? Our lives have been well-rounded—cruel but well-rounded, and I agree with your sentiments. We no longer need to conceal our true identities. We need to face our adversaries fearlessly, and we won’t tolerate these animals who are trying to keep us down. We need to fight them to the death. If the police find us, we’ll kill them. I hope they and their families get as much hell as they deserve. Most human beings, except our little circle, are psychologically maladaptive and selfish. I hope that one day, we can depopulate the planet, leaving only us left. They don’t recognize genius; they’re too caught up in their materialistic views. There are far too many of them, fraught with masculinist values.”

“SET ME FREE! PLEASE!” Evelyn implored them.

“Keep it down Evelyn,” Griffith replied, looking down with pontification.

“All I hear is bullshit, while I’m forced to stand here and suffer, day in and day out,” Evelyn retorted.

Approaching her, Griffith said, “Evelyn, you’re going to have to earn the respect you want. Your worth is in your actions.”

“I’ve done nothing to deserve this! I’ve just watched myself waste away!”

“Please don’t insult my intelligence. Appealing to sympathy is a logical fallacy, as I’ve explained to you before.”

Evelyn screeched and pounded on the wall.

Griffith said while shaking his head, “No wonder Peter was obsessed with you. You’re both vindictive and elusive—at least up until now.”

 Evelyn tried to push him away, but he slapped her in the face. He unbuttoned her skirt as James held her back. After struggling, feeling somehow heavier and heavier, she eventually escaped and pulled a knife from her pocket.

“If you don’t set me free I’ll kill myself right here!”

James ran over to her and tried to yank it out of her hand.

          “YOU COWARD! HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR PLACE?!”

The knife fell out of her hand as she resisted, and he chased her to the corner of the room, grabbing her neck.

“Stop this hysteria right now! You’re not going to abandon me! We’ve been friends for too long!”

“You’re nobody! You’ve destroyed everything!”

Evelyn ran over to the knife, as she suddenly adopted Peter’s mannequinlike expression. She grabbed it and stabbed herself in the chest, falling dead before James could stop her. Like hurt and confused schoolgirls, they gazed at her body.

“She betrayed me, even though she had so much potential. But instead she decided to waste it,” said James.

“Let’s get her out of here,” Griffith said as he picked her up.

“Let’s just stay and relax here first. We’ve had a lot to deal with.”

He put her back down. “The egocentricity of youth these days is appalling. We’re living in a land of lost souls. When I wake up every morning, I ask myself, ‘How the hell did we get here?’”

“I wish I could answer that question. I try to put these issues at the back of my mind.”

“Do you ever think that we could get past it all?”

“No, most likely not, but we may as well keep trying.”

“Have you ever wondered about all the reasons why we’re doing this? Are we really driven by a force that’s bigger than ourselves? Or is that just an illusion?”

“I don’t think it’s an illusion. I think it’s a legitimate feeling. It never feels like there’s enough time to accomplish everything though[LT5] . I always feel like someone is around the corner, ready to drag us down.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would you think that? Even though we can hardly get enough legal support anymore, we still have a great deal of status and recognition. If we can get enough admiration, even if it’s false, we can avoid incarceration forever[LT6] . Don’t forget: we’re aiming to work within the government very soon, so that any decisions we make will be disguised with the ideal political mask that no one will question.”

“But we’re not invincible, remember that.”

         James picked up Evelyn’s body. “Alright, I’m done for the day.” He unlocked the door and they departed.

Chapter Twelve:

Peter was sitting in the prison cafeteria, next to his inmate Paul who had slipped into the habit of listening to his melodramatic drivel. Maurice Gibson, another inmate, walked fiercely past them and flashed Peter a look of dread and entertainment, as if he expected some shenanigan or idiosyncrasy. Peter ate while bent miserably over his food. Maurice sat down at the table next to his, and angrily bit into his sandwich while he looked around him with covetous impertinence, as if he perceived a threat.

“There’s Peter over there,” said Maurice to a small inmate next to him, whose scholarly air had resonant similarities with regions of the upper-class that Daniel exceeded in affluence and skill, while he mimicked their mannerisms from above.

“I’ve gotta tell you Paul, it’s strange,” Peter said. “I feel across between depressed and ecstatic—it’s like that feeling you get when you’re starving but you’ve drunk a lot of caffeine. I guess I’m just adjusting to this place, and I don’t know how to handle myself. I keep telling myself, ‘Just be a gentleman, and don’t get into any trouble.’ But you know me, I’m always on the verge of doing something, well, unpredictable. I guess I’m addicted to scaring myself, [LT7] ‘cause my existence is so small. I want some surprises, and every day I’m faced with the fact that I have to create my own reality; it’s ironically more damning for me to know that it if it always remains the same, I am the only one at fault. Since it is all in my hands, I feel more powerless. I feel like everything outside me could give me more freedom than I could provide myself, and yet it never does.”

“Well, that’s just normal. Don’t worry about that. I’ve given up trying to manage myself. I just wait to see where my feelings take me, and there’s something calming about that.”

“I’ve been in a frenzy these days. I’m starting to think that the freedom I yearn isn’t real. I’m stuck with the endless banter around me, the sounds of people talking behind my back, and describing me in ways that I don’t recognize, as if I’ve never existed in my own body, or controlled my own actions. They say I’ve been heartless, but I don’t know what that truly means. To me that word is old-fashioned and poetic, the kind of term that bigots used against revolutionaries. Everyone thinks I tyrannize them, but I am indeed the most battered and beaten man there is. People despise me because I represent an idea: spiritual independence.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “You’ve been part of an elite circle for a third of your life already. What are you talking about?”

         “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.

         “Come on.”

“Don’t rob me in this way, like everyone else has! . . . Why do you look at me like I’m crazy?!”

Noticing this, Maurice laughed and exclaimed, “That nutjob is at it again.”

Peter got up and left with a display of emotion entirely new to his character. He went to sleep quickly when he reached his cell, but tossed and turned with doggish dissatisfaction and restlessness. Dmitri’s night, however, was fraught with constant interruptions. He heard loiterers outside engaged in shared tirades that disturbed his dim awareness, manifesting as garbled, vicious whispers in his imagination that woke him intermittently, as they seemed to be in his ear. He heard the footsteps of beggars and musicians, until the morning came before he felt prepared. He persuaded himself to get out of bed and went into the bathroom, checking the scars on his stomach and feeling them obsessively. Like Peter Rawson, experience was ripening his reflection insidiously, except that in Dmitri’s case, he had a hardened calmness that would anger the self-righteous.

When Dmitri went downstairs, he noticed that he had regained his appetite. He came to his senses when the food touched his tongue, as his tangibility, fun, desire, devotion and self-referentiality returned. All was well when this second adolescence possessed him, in which the material world was a convent for his spirit. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from feeling his scars ridden with stitches, and he wished he could sink into the earth to see what the pitch blackness might force him to perceive, mostly within himself while he relied on the sounds of the world to inspire new sensations, joining the ranks with Daniel’s novel transformations. It was mainly his humiliation that drove his need for escape, as he felt used and shaken by all that befell him. There was a knock at the door, but he ignored it and he went upstairs and took a cold bath to bring himself back to normalcy. Shock value took precedent over his catty and willful attachments that persisted his stubbornness.

         Dmitri got out of the bathtub after an hour and decided to walk before writing and painting. He ran into Daniel on his way into the coffee shop, where he saw the landscape beyond it.

         “Hey,” Daniel greeted him with a tone more energized than Dmitri had ever heard. “How’s everything going? You alright these days?”

         “Yes, but I need some space for myself,” said Dmitri, blushing. He realized that this statement had slipped out of him before he could reason with his own reservations.

         “Come on, you can tell me a little bit about what’s going on,” Daniel said with a kind of parental cordiality.

         Dmitri sighed and said, “I know about what you’ve discovered. I think I can help you. I know we got off on the wrong track many years ago, but I think I can set things straight. Please give me a chance this time. Don’t push me away again. I’m not just some tight-ass who wants you to cater to me. I want you to be excited, content. I want the same things I would want for everyone else.”

         “I’m at the stage where I can do that,” Daniel said, feeling these words to be stilted while masking a trace of defiance and defensiveness. “What is it that you want to help me with?
         “With your investigation,” said Dmitri. “Now that it’s clear what these people are about, I think I can take you to places from my childhood that have more of the answers. These give evidence of the rift between the ‘muse women’ and this cult. The men of Griffith Alliance are trying to rid gynocentric influence from religion, because they want to bring back aspects of NAMBLA through adopting some of Greek spiritual culture. Even though they engage in violence and pedophilia against kids and adults of both genders, they still seem to be giving these Dionysian practices a special significance.”

         “I knew it!” Daniel said in a deep and craggy voice. “Well, you have to decide now when we are gonna explore these places, because time is running out.”

         “We’ll meet tonight,” Dmitri said. “Trust me. I can make things right. Maybe I’ve been a bit of a ninny and a freak in the past, but I’m a new person now just like you.” His voice cracked a little, and he went inside without saying goodbye. Daniel followed him with vibrant curiosity, and said, “Wait. I want to talk to you. It’s been so long. You can’t just run off like this.” Dmitri looked him and chuckled uneasily. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m sorry. Let’s sit down and talk.

         They ordered coffee and pastries and sat down. Daniel noticed that Dmitri was sometimes slurring his words, as his gaze became lazy and unfocused, as if a kind of weakness appeared. They talked endlessly about Dmitri’s parents, and their interest in law and criminality that had kept Dmitri well-trained, easily observant of people. His absence of gullibility was mistakenly teamed with Daniel’s demeaning views, while in reality he was a warrior of purpose, even if this attracted bullies along the way.

         Before they left, Dmitri said, “My uncle Carl would sometimes swing by and make fun of me. I never knew why my dad tolerated it.”

         “What kinds of things did he say?” Daniel asked, hoping that something in this tale might resonate with his experiences.

         “He once said to me, ‘You think too much,’” said Dmitri wryly. “The weird thing is that in that moment, as well as several times after, he said this whenever he was intentionally making me feel awkward, and in spite of this, he was still surprised that I was struggling for the proper response. The first time he used this one on me, was when he pointed out my ‘unorthodox interests.’”

         Daniel shook his head as they got up and departed into the autumn sunshine.

         Later that day, they went into the more uninhabited parts of the city, in which belly dancers from Paradiso Bar Lounge hung about, while keeping their wits about them in case of any swindlers or thieves. Dmitri guided Daniel into St. Paul’s Cemetery, in which cloaked protestors sometimes lurked around with flowers in their arms. The whistling wind conducted the horrible lull in their chatter, the grand pause that they wished some colorful character might end with a tough and daring phrase, likening quite wonderfully to this Bohemian community.

         When a cloaked muse stood over them, on a bust from which a statue had been removed, Daniel gasped as he realized that this was the place where some of Griffith’s bloody practices had taken place.

         “W-Why did he remove the statue here? I think I remember him talking about this on television,” said Daniel.

         “It was the statue of my great grandfather Victor. He was the one who started that radical movement—”

         “Oh, I remember now! It was ratting out criminals in the government.”

         They kept walking until they found destroyed statues of women from mysticism, some of whom were cabaret performers that the androgynous beings modeled themselves after, while adding their own dangerous twists.

“This is exactly what I mean,” said Dmitri. “It’s all coming back to me now. These are the places we visited when we were in high school, remember?”

“Yes. . .” Daniel trembled as they made their way through this maze of Pavlovian clues and images, slamming the doors in the face of his denial. The veiled muses achieved this the fastest, since he recalled that they saved him from a few altercations with Peter, while they mostly stayed on the outskirts of the city. The statues of them had been demolished, largely because they supported the attempted cleansing of the government. Daniel kept seeing a police officer grimly eyeing them through the gates. Ignoring this, the two eventually concluded the evening with a visit to the tower that looked over the cemetery. After ascending seven flights of stairs in mercurial grayness and darkness, enclosed by frosted windows, they reached the top where Anastassya’s corpse lay in the candlelit room, never having aged or decayed in the past twenty years. She lay under a deep-red blanket with her hands together just above her waist.

“No one is sure how she was killed exactly,” said Dmitri. “Many think she may have poisoned by some of the hallucinogenics.”

In spite of her authority, she brought a kind of mawkishness to her own fatality. But this was not deserving of disdain, since she was a monument of wordless temptation.

Chapter Thirteen

Swarms of female protestors in 1930s dresses, filled the streets outside as Christina sat in her living room, discussing serious matters with her father David. Suicides had pervaded this town, as more became aware that Peter was soon going to be released from prison. There was a dim hope among others that he would be caught by vigilantes after his release, with gruff attire and black masks that embodied all the retrograde heresies his mental illness despised. The city was alighted with all the best and worst, breaking windows and burning cars as Daniel and Dmitri were seen walking through the crowds, heading home briskly while Christina glanced at them with worry. She wondered if the rapid decline was because Peter, though he wasn’t the leader of his organization, caused the greatest rage because he was a mouthpiece for his clan’s unwritten vices, the slimiest and basest, the cheapest and most effortless drudgery that was only made aware of itself in moments of poor confidence, while it pressed onward in all other circumstances. She pounded her fists on the table and wept heavily, while her father paced back and forth. The shattering sounds outside reminded her of her journey through the cavernous depths, in which ice was demolished in the workmen’s efforts to uncover broken bases. She was startled by her own reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, as Daniel’s had several times in his inconstant moods and flights of fancy.

“Dad, it’s too late now,” she said. “Evelyn is dead[LT8] , and on top of it I can’t have her killer prosecuted. It seems like we’re sliding back to where we were.”

“This is hell,” David said, losing his voice due to his head cold, and the surprise inflicted by previous days. “What are we going to do when the cult becomes globally influential. Then we’ll really be screwed. Let’s just hope that eighty percent of the world’s countries don’t get economically and physically destroyed like they have in the past, because of constant wars.”

“I’d like to think that we’ve got enough prowess and knowledge to prevent them from destroying the planet, but on the other hand, I keep thinking that maybe in spite of the cult’s buffoonery and unrealistic ideas, they still have some ability to be cunning and clever, in which case they will be much harder to defeat. I feel that at the end of the day, the situation is utterly hopeless.”

“Don’t give up that quickly. I’m sure there’s a solution. We just have to expand our horizons, and expand our perspective so that we have more latitude, and we can face these pseudo-academics and psychopaths with gusto. I’ve never condoned violence in the past, but I’m starting to feel that it’s the only option. These[LT9]  people we’re dealing with, resemble the demons that people used to warn the population about, and those people used to be laughingstocks to us, since they never tried to appear charming and agreeable. They were just blunt and honest.”

“Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It feels like honesty is a sin nowadays. I wish that I could just flee the country; I wish it were that simple. But I have to stay here and figure out how to overthrow these people, since now, they seem to be leaking into the government. I was hoping they would stay out of politics, since they are religious fanatics with seemingly no interest in real affairs, or people’s well-being and prosperity. They’re like every other intellectual elite group; they don’t see other people as real. They only see them as a string of ideas and theories that they can apply whenever convenient.”

Their quandaries were then disrupted by a policeman bursting into the room. His round, fat-cheeked and obsessive face was worsened by his series of long and almost inaudible pants. Christina rose from her chair. “W-What happened? What’s going on? What is—”

“You’ve been spreading false information about Marcus Griffith’s organization, and—“

“No! This isn’t right! I swear! Everything I said was true! They killed my friend Evelyn! There are mountains of evidence! Please!”

David bellowed, “LEAVE HER ALONE! THIS IS ALL WRONG! YOU’VE GOT IT ALL WRONG! THERE’S PLENTY OF EVIDENCE, I SWEAR!”

“You’re only making this harder on yourself, Christina,” said the policeman. “Just come with me. It’s over.”

Policeman tried to handcuff her, but she punched him and ran away. He chased her and pinned her to the floor. He handcuffed her and he tremored in a torrential gluttony of the mind, as he began suffocating her under his weight and exertion.

“YOU’RE KILLING HER! STOP!”

Eventually noticing that she’s stopped resisting, the policeman pulled her up and notices that she was limp and responseless, and there was no pulse or hearbeat left. David ran over to her, and crumpled to the floor after the police officer attempted to make her stand in clumsy embarrassment. David felt her pulse and checked her heartbeat, and tried to resuscitate her by pushing on her chest.

“Come on Christina! Come on! You can do it!”

         When he realized all was futile, he almost screamed but was stifled by faintness, as the policeman said, “You’ve seen this coming, you’ve seen this coming all along. This should come as no surprise. You stay here to clean up the mess. I’ll have no part in this any longer[LT10] , and don’t try to get the law involved. They won’t do a damn thing.”

David looked up at him with a lobotomized expression of resignation and acceptance, while the policeman said, “You’ve all brought this on yourselves.”

Three days later was Peter’s last night in jail, and his kvetching became even more like a merciless stream-of-consciousness. Anastassya stood behind him with her eyes closed, the vision that persisted no matter how hard he fought and argued.

“I never saw anything as it was,” he exclaimed. “I was full of self-obsession and now my wife is dead because of it. The only way I could finally reach into myself, get in touch with my emotions was through some kind of tragedy. Nothing else could get me to arrive here. Why does it always require the worst to transition into this territory? It feels like some kind of punishment, whenever things play out that way. I want to believe that I made it all on my own, but that just doesn’t seem possible. Why don’t I ever get a chance?! Why does it have to end this way?! I’ve tried to do so much for humanity, and yet I was always pushed into a corner, made to look like a fool. Evelyn could have worked things out with me, but instead she took the coward’s way out, and Christina was unreliable. What an idiot! I should have predicted this! She never listened to me, and continued with her kitchen-sink, preachy and average-joe rhetoric. Now, I’m at a crossroads. I could either worsen or rehabilitate myself. I’m too afraid to change. I don’t know what it entails. Maybe I was better off as that thug I was when my parents tried to raise me, who didn’t need theory to busy himself, or make all he did seem like it was for a good cause. At least I was safer then.”

“This was what I always warned you about,” said Anastassya. “But now you must deal with the ramifications. It is all in your hands.” She vanished with the hissing sound of flames.

Chapter Fourteen

When Peter was released, he stalled for four days at going to his own mansion and facing his wife. He slept on benches and sometimes satisfied himself by listening to the harp music in the various parks of this affluent place. There was nothing more delightful than being reminded of this heartless and simple world, which he had believed was unworthy of his care. But at 1 am, he saw members of the alliance shooting at police officers and pedestrians, and he got up abruptly to see what all this entailed. To his acutest dismay, he saw that Daniel was one of these officers, with a cockiness he had dreaded. Why did Peter feel that he had raised this young man, even though he had barely any role in his upbringing? But instead of the facile courage he expected from himself, he ran away at full speed the moment Daniel’s gaze reached him, and knees caved in when he was two blocks from his mansion. He noticed more officers lurking around, and he hid behind a shop in an alleyway where drug-addicted beggars glanced at him disapprovingly. They knew what counterculture was in its most painful and undeserved aspects, while his crimes were a spoiled display they never wished to witness again. They didn’t want history to be impacted by it.

“What do you want? What are you staring at?” Peter exclaimed.

He got up and kept running, even though he cognitively knew of his own privilege and protection.

“Go away! Let me be!”

He turned away from his mansion when he arrived, and he crossed the street to the coffee shop. When he went inside he sat down to catch his breath before ordering. When hecklers and protestors approached him, he pushed them off and growled, “Watch it! I’m warning you!”

Peter hunched over in the same way he did in jail, and went to the counter to order coffee.

“Crazy out there, isn’t it?” he said, trying to adopt a kind of hip demeanor. The man at the cashier nodded and yawned, as if he had become accustomed to all this far too soon.

“I wonder what it’ll be like when we’ve settled this. Maybe all these hippie clowns will be out of our hair, and out of the art business.” He took his coffee and went back to his table, sipping with obnoxious loudness. He agitatedly ran his fingers through his hair, and he looked outside to see if Daniel was watching him.

“That shit better be gone by the time I get home,” he mumbled and sipped with more control.

He put his face on the table and then sat up, looking at the ceiling while placing his hands on his ears, blocking out the commotion outside. He gritted his teeth and then stopped himself from wallowing any further, humming one of the harp pieces he had heard in the park.

Invisible to everyone except the large-eyed women of the mountains and cemetery, Rose’s ghost passed through the chaotic crowds, absorbing the moods and energies of others. This caused an array of colors to shine inside her stomach, as it rose and fell with her breaths: emerald, magenta, gold, red and pink. A visage sometimes appeared on this humanoid, vibrational mass, resembling a drawn smiley face that the finest shadows seemed to structure. The rest of the time her head was empty blue light that, in the dusk, began to show more variety and definition, leaving wonderful remains of what she had been before all had been removed, and brought to a crossfire in which the imprint of her former self could pass through unharmed. Empathy and prudence were no longer synonymous, since she stood outside the affairs of many. Rose saw that Igor had joined the ranks of these awful men and wished she could find some way of informing Dmitri. But she felt that perhaps he already knew and that showing up before him at this time would make him as mad and raving as Peter. Little did she know that Dmitri was destined to discover his brother’s role in the worst way imaginable, as he fretted behind the door of his mansion, hearing the persistent commotion outside. He wanted to join Rose in her hidden, nomadic existence and abandon all the trifling, whiny bureaucrats and elites, leaving them to fend for the mess they produced. But he fought this urge to put everything to end, as he felt that he had to become a better assistant to Daniel. He also had the uncanny sensation that he was bound to discover his brother was involved with these criminals, a prophecy confirmed the moment he opened the door.

---

Secrets Revealed

After seeing two more ulcers on his liver, Dr. Hallworth said, “Most of the ulcers have disappeared, which is a good sign. But you will still need to keep track of your symptoms, since there is still enough toxicity in your brain to cause occasional lapses in your cognition, or paranoid thoughts.”

Daniel sighed, followed by an anomaly that interrupted his brooding. He heard the same voice that Dmitri had last night, except that of course, Dmitri had never told him of this encounter. It murmured something incoherently, followed by a child’s voice that said, “I don’t want anything anymore. I’m tired. I’ve seen way too much.” After this was nothing.

Chapter Five:

At 7 pm, Peter began walking again through the windy streets, and past a gray dog that sometimes barked at him, frolicking without an owner. As it paced its voice broke in a wraithlike vein, as Peter snarled and moved more swiftly, his gait becoming robotic and militant. In the distance he saw a woman, with a familiar attire and stature. For the first few moments, he berated himself for his own irrationality, pondering this phenomenal sensation. She looked exactly as she did in Dmitri’s painting: the same nightgown and eyes, closed and more colossal than humanly possible. She was standing barefooted on the sidewalk, and as he came closer. She was Anastassya. How hadn’t he known at the very first second? Had it been his wizened perception that prevented him from believing his own senses?

Peter became livid and terrified, and his demeanor deadened immensely. He now played the patriarch who defied the unknown, turning his existence inside out. His feverish indulgences that pinned him against society, could be dangled in the limelight of her stature. Taunting her would be easy, as she seemed demure and self-effacing. But as he came closer, he saw that she carried a self-intoxication, which was unlike anything he’d seen before. She was obviously too strong for his caprices, which may have worked upon Igor. He was up against something too supple and angelic for ideology, and the nonsense that businessmen had taught him in his training. He was an administrator whose occasional monotone was never a disadvantage, collaborating with the other elites to make draconian decisions. His trite and roundabout speech made him more successful in the legal system, than many of the others. His speech therapist had told him in adolescence, as he labored to overcome his monotone, that his own deficiencies might be accepted in the field that interested him, as he was intrigued in the realm of persuasion and false diplomacy. His glibness was born from this capacity, which only irritated Dmitri as he was never easily fooled. Dmitri was the meditative alpha-male, who those of Peter’s breed despised. No one knew what to predict, with such an honest and untamable temperament. Peter presently felt that this woman’s insolence, made Dmitri a trifle in comparison.

When Peter was close to her, he asked distantly, “What do you want?”

Then he chided himself for immediately assuming this was real. He had never deluded himself as many did, in the luxury that the world was a fairytale, and that Fate dwelled around him to correct the wrongdoer.

She seemed to answer him with some cosmic gesture that brought him hurling back to his senses, a place that he had never allowed for quite some time. Behind her appeared the faint, misty configuration of Rose, which fleetingly manifested. Peter grinded his teeth as he melted into contorted wrath, followed by a stoic dismissal of his reaction. He looked at her with gleaming impatience, which intermittently poked through his stillness.

“What?! What do you want?!” he screamed. She then vanished in way that made him question his own sanity, as its brevity and lightness turned off the vigilance within him, which had distorted his will. It was the chaos of awareness that he ambitiously avoided, until it cascaded into him without notice. He wished to believe that this was some practical joke, waiting with petulance for the punchline to come, or for some grand revelation to humiliate his profound negligence, his sense of self, his pride, and all that he had ever worked for—well, at least what he thought he earned, through the sweat and blood of selfish compulsions. He could make reality serve him according to convenience.

“Come back!” he screamed. “Face me, you idiot! Show me what you truly are! Show everyone what you truly are!”

The nymph didn’t return, leaving him as an abandoned imbecile. He looked around furtively, hoping that some logical explanation might emerge, some devious strategy designed to drive him off a cliff. But all he saw were mansions, churches and skipping little girls who seemed supernal and beyond human, after what he had witnessed. The innocent became more beautiful, after he was confronted with their origins. A group of them came speeding toward him, going past him while whispering among each-other about the “shady man” standing near them. One of them had a face with whale-like wideness and roundness, a symmetry that suited her dark-brown locks. The other three seemed thin and underfed, trailing behind her with competitive laughs, some private gossip giving adrenaline to their motions.

“Get me out of here,” he whispered to himself, wishing some invisible hand would show mercy. But his train of thought was interrupted, by Marcus Griffith who approached him.

“Peter! It’s been a while. How are you?”

Peter yawned and said deliriously, without bothering to share his experience, “I don’t feel like myself. I think I’d be better off if we just strolled for a while.”

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing. I just need to get my head to together, and I’ll be fine.”

“Well, I’ve got some news that’ll cheer you up. Based on the tremendous improvement you’ve shown, I’ve assigned you as one of the supervisors, while also carrying out tasks when necessary, since you still have the adroitness and fitness I’m looking for. I think your potential has shown its true colors. It’s been a little intense and taxing for everyone. But that’s how it works at the beginning. We’re all getting used to ourselves.” He chuckled.

“That’s wonderful!” Peter grinned with sudden gentlemanliness. “I’ve been waiting for this. I felt I deserved it all along, but I didn’t want to tell anyone. I thought it would be interesting to see if people caught on and recognized my efforts. That’s what I always felt was lacking in Rose. She felt I owed her everything.”

“Well, she’s out of the picture now. It’s not your fault you failed with her. You know what kind of family she comes from. They’re the kinds of rich people, who call us white knights. They’re afraid of moneyed men with brains, who want to make a difference.”

Peter laughed and said, “Aside from all that, I’m so thankful for the opportunity you’ve given me. There wouldn’t be a better time for this. Things are getting so heated. More and more federal officers are after us, and I keep having to remind myself that not all of the law is on our side.”

“You’ve got determination. I like that. You’re not that typical entrepreneur, who I’ve had to deal with in the past. You’re tactical and you’re never too attached to anyone. Keep going. You’ve got the right spirit.”

“I’ve got doubts though,” Peter said, stifling a yawn. “Sometimes I think Dmitri will take a stab at our organization. He’s been acting crazier lately. I’m worried about him.”

“Me too. I think we need to keep an eye on him, just in case he loses his marbles,” Griffith said, trying to keep a jovial tone while his brow furrowed. “The unstable ones are always the ones who know how to seem the most together. Dmitri’s basically the cougar, creeping up on you silently and ready to attack. Never underestimate him.”

“I could take him, don’t worry,” Peter said, waving his hand abruptly. “I have years of training, and I’m tired of his bullshit. What he calls being a man is what I call White Knight Syndrome. I’ll feel like I’ll kill him the next time I see him. I don’t know what to do with myself. Maybe I need to cool down before I can have a reasonable conversation with him.” Griffith nodded as they exited through the boulevard of thick trees. 

When they arrived at the monastery, Peter decided to sit alone with the windows dimmed by the evening, and the austere room in which chairs were spread haphazardly. The room’s chemical smell and peeling paint gave it modest homeliness. This plane of reality stampeded the pretense of the world outside it, which he encountered in his struggles to be served and understood. Igor then walked in with the veneration Peter yearned from him, after he had disappeared for months under his brother’s pathetic influence.

“It’s been so long,” Peter said hazily, getting up from his chair and facing him. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened, really,” Igor replied with a meek snicker. “I’ve just had a lot to think about. And I believe maybe you’ve been right all along. You showed me much more than you even realize. But I kept turning to Dmitri, hoping he’d wake up. I feel like I’ve wasted too much time.”

“Well, what do you propose we do now?” Peter asked brusquely. “Dmitri’s become crazier and crazier these days. I’ve watched all of his altercations with you, and he’s even talked about wanting to overthrow us. I don’t know whether it’s just angry banter, or whether he really means it.”

“Of course he does,” Igor replied in a high frigid voice. “I think the core reason why he’s so enraged about his dead wife, is because she was a crutch for him to lean on, something to make himself feel validated. He wasn’t truly compassionate or loving. And she was no help either. She tried to get in the way of your goals and take away what was important to you. I feel like her death was a way of the universe taking care of us, moving obstacles out of the way. You were just a conduit for it.”

“That’s the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Peter replied patronizingly, as they departed together with eerily satisfied gaits. “Would you be willing to assist me from now on?”

“Yes,” Igor replied shyly.

Chapter Six:

During that evening, Dmitri fell asleep on his couch an hour and a half before his departure, as he had planned to visit his friends at the bar lounge. In the encroaching maw of slumber, he dreamt that he was standing near the couch and floating a few inches above the floor. A few feet away, he saw a silhouetted woman with her head tilted to the side, looking through the window of his kitchen. After a few moments, the dream ended and was promptly followed by another, which was the same one he had as a child. He was even his twelve-year-old self, except that his adult perception intermingled with his younger one. Anastassya’s majesty was enflamed in greater vividness. Much later on, minutes before he awoke, he dreamt that he ran through a dark basement as his twelve-year-old self again, sometimes in soaring motions that went several feet, as the basement stretched on for miles. Fearing freedom and solidarity wasn’t in his vocabulary, or even in his makeup at this turn of mind.

When he woke up, he frantically prepared to leave as he realized he was running late. He frustratedly put on his coat and grabbed his wallet, as he noticed his disheveled hair and crooked collar in the mirror. When he left, Anastassya seemed to follow him. He felt her closeness though he never saw it, as his laxity welcomed her. Apprehensions were merely goals of which to aspire, emotions that reminded oneself of reason and precaution, yet with no further depth and inquiry. He was above this nonsense even when she was visible, in moments when the city’s crowds were ambling half-engaged, brewing with blind intentness while he strayed as the witness and outsider. Why had she come now? Why did he feel more readiness than appropriate? Just like his tragedies, was he destined for this shift of experience? Could he open his cognition to the warmth of intervention, perceiving what most would flee from? At this thought he stopped in his tracks, as it dawned on him what his sight had captured, but his whole being hadn’t fully processed.

As Dmitri resumed his traversion, he briefly saw the nose-less stranger, meandering through the tightly packed pedestrians in a white doctor’s coat, and gray cotton pants. Pensive self-pity haunted his somewhat featureless face, with grandiosity that repelled Dmitri’s interest. A patch of rural beatitude occupied his view instead, as its distant grassland was spread at the fringes of the mountains. As the sky darkened, he heard the screeching of swine. He saw some of them eating debris on the grass, with humanlike alertness in the abrupt motions of their heads. The sickly-sweet pinkness of the poison that still plagued him, thundered through his imagination. This was so poignant that he wondered whether it had been a shimmer on the lake, disturbing this cubicle of peaceful sedation.

He felt the urge to go beneath the surface and examine all that was there, knowing it would be harmless. But he continued his journey, soon arriving at the train station on Miller Street, where Daniel stood smoking with pursed lips, enjoying his temporary solitude. Then, across the street from the station he noticed that Peter had seized a young girl, who looked about nine. Her tormented gestures as she struggled against him, pierced that twilight zone Daniel knew in himself, between delusion and awareness. His disbelief made the scene seem jumbled and disorganized, without the ability to integrate all that he saw.

It was quickly evident that Peter was trying to violate her, at which Daniel charged across the street. He leapt on him with a surge of malice he felt he had buried in his social fortress, showing itself in small ways while everyone else was complacent. His intelligence would have been called amoral by some, even though it was keenly empathic, while its satirical spice seemed irreverent to the common person. He was now in the trenches of his true self, and all his most primal desires that lay themselves out, feeling that he could be a saint for Dmitri, proving himself to not just be an anti-religious recluse. In fact, he had many friends, and his ambitions were evident when triggered by necessity, in the direst and most unusual circumstances that brought him hurling down on his enemy, immersed in superb satisfaction while also concerned about what the future would bring. Would Peter somehow frame him, having him incarcerated for some contrived reason without the soundness of proof?

Daniel repeatedly punched him as more and more people watched, trying to interfere but being shoved away by Peter.

“Really think you’re somebody, don’t you?!” Peter screamed. “To me, you’re all the same! You all look and act the same! You all think the same! Give me one reason why I should give you any more chances?!”

When the police emerged from the station, they pulled both of them into their car as Daniel breathed heavily, feeling lightheaded with the sensation that neglect and ignorance had finally left his body, distilling his identity down to its rough edges. The policewomen were more apprehensive about him than they were about Peter, as if they sensed that something new had appeared through crisis and opportunity.

When they arrived at the police station, they were impatiently escorted from the car and into the building, and promptly shoved into a cell, where Peter examined Daniel with the concern of a psychiatrist.

“So, this is how it’s going to be between us?” he asked, his monotone appearing again.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Peter replied coldly. “You suffer from the same weakness Dmitri has. You pretend you’re so different from him. But you two are far more alike than you realize. I’ve watched you grow up. I know what you are. Igor also tried to rehabilitate you, just like he did with his brother. But like his brother, you’re incredibly pigheaded and impossible to convince of anything. You bathe in all your addictions, and live off of everyone else—”

“Who the hell are you to say that?!”

“You dominate your environment,” Peter said diagnostically.

Daniel refused to continue the argument any further. They sat in silence for an indefinite period of time, while Peter waited patiently for him to reply, his disappointment growing. Meanwhile, the Peter’s victim was hospitalized, due to the cuts on her forehead and the broken arm and leg caused by her attacker.

“I’ve seen him before!” She wept as she lay in the hospital room. “Who is he?!”

“I don’t know. We’re trying to get this all settled. There’s so many loose ends,” the doctor said furtively, as he put antiseptic on her wounds. 

“Tell me! I want to know now!”

“Everything’s going to be okay. Just calm down. We’ll figure this all out,” the doctor replied in a steady voice.

The girl felt that reality moved in slow motion, with the suffocating sensation that she was being played by someone much higher in faculties, having planned all that she experienced. She ended her inquiries and collected herself, reminding herself that she didn’t deserve this fate.

In the meantime, Dmitri’s travel was met with a subaquatic view, as the train went through one of the tunnels next to the bases. The bluish black and rippling terrain seemed unoccupied, except for occasional, high-pitched noises that woke his attention, as well as other passengers. A school of codfish brushed past the tunnel’s window, followed by a silver, amorphous transparency. Having seen this on the brink of dozing off, Dmitri was befuddled. When he arrived at Thomas Hall Station, he went through the same passageway as he did on his stroll the other night. When he reached the lounge, he greeted Katya who was walking through the entrance with raised, courteously expectant eyebrows, as if she was thinking some elegant soliloquy.

“Daniel said he would be here at six-thirty,” she said, looking at her watch. “I don’t know where he is. I can’t reach him. It’s weird. Usually, he shows up earlier than he says, and he just loiters around talking to his friends, or making jokes to get attention. But it’s been half an hour.”

Dmitri furrowed his brow and said, “Maybe there’s a delay on the subway.”

Though Daniel had become an utter outsider, irrelevant to his affairs, he felt that his presence was something to be accounted for. His whole personality was a relaxing antidote, a background shadow that hued each circumstance with intrigue. He hoped for him to arrive by some miracle, and show that he had not caved into desperate or depressive seclusion.

Adrian greeted Dmitri and said, “How was the appointment today? Did you sort out what you wanted to?”

“Yes,” Dmitri replied calmly. “She said the toxin is almost gone from my body, but that I just need to take these pills to get rid of the remainder. That’s something I’ve been waiting to hear for quite a while. I didn’t know what was going on, I had this paranoia that I wouldn’t live to see thirty. But I was proven wrong. I can focus on my work much easier now. To have someone like her who cares so much about me, is a big shift from what I’ve been dealing with. The disturbing part is that I think Igor is on Peter’s side, but he’s been struggling to admit that to me. I’m trying to wrap my head around why. I always knew that he was messed up. He’s not the average coward, let’s put it that way. I feel like he has a secret, just like Griffith’s organization.”

Adrian snorted and said, “You’ve got that right. But I wouldn’t read into it too much. He’s a difficult man, and like everyone else, he gets less logical with age. You’ve just gotta bear with him. I know you’ll probably feel like strangling him every now and then, but know that it will pass. Keep a sense of humor. Remember what you were meant to do. You were meant to be much more than people like him. But be cautious. Don’t let him take advantage of you. He might be chickenshit, but he’s no fool. Or—well, he’s not enough of an idiot to be completely irrelevant.”

Dmitri began anxiously guzzling down his beer, quivering afterwards like a duck shaking off water.

“I love this place,” he said dreamily. “Whenever I have a nightmare, I always wish I’d wake up here. It’s where the normal people are, the kind who don’t have an agenda.”

“Everyone has an agenda, Dmitri,” Adrian said sagaciously. He guzzled down his own beer and said, “Katya is gonna be performing again tonight, which you’ll be glad to know.”

Dmitri strained a mild grin. “She is a unique character. I’m more than glad to have her here.”

“Have you ever considered singing?”
“No, that would be too much of a stretch,” Dmitri said, with amused

modesty.

         “I could imagine you as a singer,” said Adrian, with a friendly facetiousness. “You seem like you’d be intense and committed. And you’ve got interesting body language. It’s mild mannered, which people like in performers nowadays. Katya would like it especially.”

“That’s true,” Dmitri said whimsically, sipping his beverage with a little more prudence.

Once the bar lounge became sufficiently crowded, Katya began performing the same song as the other night. Her thoughts seemed feverishly preoccupied, which dulled her presentation a little. But her voice still rang with that assuredness, which familiarized her public image. When the evening drew on and thickened into sociability, Dmitri felt the urge to sneak away into the underground passageways, to see what else was there. When he reached the basement, he went through the door and heard the voices of adolescents nearby, running about and rejoicing in this grungy void they often frequented.

Then Dmitri noticed a young boy, one of the many ill strangers who wandered here, with a contemptuous, abstracted expression. Three cuts were on his neck, and his ripped jeans revealed bruises on his knees. From a doorway nearby came Adam Rowe’s voice, “Now, come in here. Don’t be shy.” Adam effeminately laughed as the boy came closer to the doorway, looking into it with an anguished expression. Through it another stranger entered, presumably one of Adam’s subordinate disciples or administrators. This wretch was a small thin man with large square glasses. He had a moustache, his brown hair was parted to the right, and his countenance was affectedly formal, difficult to read. But when the boy reached the doorway the man grinned, revealing teeth that seemed artificial: entirely white and perfectly shaped. Dmitri’s mouth went dry as he saw this.

“There we go,” the man said, in a voice similar to the other. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to guide him through, but the boy furiously pushed him away.

“Come on now,” the man said, with a feigned patience. “Be reasonable, I’m not—“ The boy then vomited blood, and Dmitri rushed over to him.

“Do you want me to call the doctor?!” Dmitri asked.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him just fine,” the man said, with a hearty tone that had a hint of callousness. The boy vomited again, as he stumbled away from the man. Dmitri helped him maintain his balance by following behind, and putting his hands on his arms.

“We need to get him to the emergency room!” he exclaimed.

“We’ll take care of him. Don’t worry about it,” the man said.

Dmitri decided not to flee immediately, because he didn’t want to make any definitive assumptions about this predicament. As a first priority, he reached into his pocket with the intention of dialing 911, but then saw a scruffy man appear through the doorway, and lunge at him with an air of a bullish automaton. He pulled out his baton and began thrashing him, and after Dmitri fought and resisted the stranger uncapped the knife at the baton’s end, and stabbed Dmitri in the stomach, after which came blackness and nothingness. Except this time, instead of finding himself in some comatose state that would soon end and revive his hopes, he was, not long after his ordeal, standing over his own body. It was a phenomenon he had never believed in, and his present scream of despair felt muted in the chambers of his brain, as if he had disassociated on multiple levels. When he looked around all the perpetrators were gone. He walked slowly through the hall, wondering what his next move would be, and if there was some due process, some breadcrumb path to follow even on the brink of the hereafter, since a flicker of hope inside him said he had another chance. It was a still small voice, much more pleasant than Igor’s antic tone, which said that he could return to his own body at the time that Fate had designated for him.

Chapter Seven:

In the days that Daniel peevishly fidgeted and smoked in his cell, while Peter sometimes stared at him contemplatively, Daniel’s past gained fullness and coherence within him, as the barriers of pain finally lifted off his senses. Nothing was hard to retrieve, and all was an oasis of knowledge he could use against the wretch who accompanied him, when they reached their day in court. This was indeed the cell he was tortured within as a young boy, which he recognized due to its spray-painted pictures on the walls: large-nosed, obnoxious caricatures who were choking bookish, straitlaced men wearing suits and lipstick. He pondered the meaning and history behind these images, as he remembered a hallmarked sequence from his adolescence that followed his punishment, in which Florence Abigail, Dmitri’s doctor, was also a teacher at John Wright High. Being in her twenties at the time, her highbrow air of conviction had an iridescent cuteness, with which Dmitri, one of her other students, was enamored while Daniel was undoubtedly annoyed. Her hair, like nowadays, was wavy and bright-orange, and her thin lips gave blessed portraiture to her large round glasses. But Daniel was one day met with something he never expected. When she spoke to Daniel after class, she said, “I want to share your essay on atheism with the class next week. It really blew me away. I think you’re smarter than most people in this era.” Daniel smirked while his gaze apprehensively hit the floor, realizing that his inner thought process had become visible.

His present view of these graffiti pictures made this all the more real to him. He had written an essay as a seventeen-year-old, about the folly in the belief in God, which he claimed stemmed from perversions so deep that they couldn’t at first be identified by the common person. They mainly involved the Id’s relationship with power and violence and sensuality, which sometimes personified itself in mystical ways that disguised themselves as transcendent. These theories were inspired by the eerie awakenings that he had seen in Dmitri on the cusp of puberty, which Daniel had found extremely harrowing when dumped upon him. Philosophizing became his way of coping with the uncontrollable, and compartmentalizing everything in various ways that he knew were simplistic, but he couldn’t let go of for fear of becoming too locked in to a sense of obligation, a binding tie to his world that required action, as well as caring for others. He felt satisfied in this small bubble, in which he could please the authority for whom his respect wavered, and at its high points was a golden pierce of glory.

The next morning, Peter Rawson said to him, “I often ask myself why I don’t just kill you, since I have the perfect opportunity. I guess it’s because I’m trying to figure you out. I feel like I’ve waited this whole time, just to see whether or not you were up to the challenge, whether you could throw away your old self and start fresh. You’ve never had any sense of direction. I think it’s time that I give that to you.”

Daniel chuckled. “And how are you gonna do that?”

“I can use pain, if you want. It seems like that’s the only way to get people of this generation to do anything. I felt like you never really had any real father figure around, as you grew up. That’s why you’ve been floating.”

“You don’t even know what any of that means. You’re just throwing a bunch of words around, like you usually do. What do you know about me anyway? Name one thing. I dare you.”

“You’re seductive—in a dangerous way,” said Peter gravely. “You bring people into your circle, and yet you keep them at just enough of a distance that no one will really know you or interfere with you, and you make sure to always distract them. All your nonsense makes for a great show, but none of it will work on me.”

Daniel’s expression became cryptic and obstinate, as if he was festering and preparing for a duel on the horizon.

“So, tell me more about myself,” Daniel said facetiously. “I’m curious.”

“You’ll have to tell me the rest,” Peter said with a competitive, psychiatric countenance, at which Daniel walked away from him, facing the wall with his head leaned impatiently and wistfully against it.

A few days later, they were summoned to court, and all that happened prophetically matched his expectations. While the two stood before the judge, whose grouchiness provided wondrous comic relief, Peter was rambling for hours about Daniel’s instability, in the same vein that he spoke about Dmitri.

“He’s had a history of mental health issues” said Peter sternly, as his victim watched in utter mortification from above, and her parents sobbed loudly.

“Give me some evidence to work with,” the judge said, leaning forward with a knowing look, since he already surmised the treachery he was up against.

“Daniel has been causing trouble for quite some time. He was rambling about me when he was a teenager, spreading these rumors about my ‘criminal behavior.’ The girl I forced myself upon has become a story as old as the hills, and given enough time to be distorted and blown out of proportion. Like I said at the very beginning, I was trying to get her to see the severity of the situation, and she became more and more taciturn and uncooperative—”

“Oh, there goes your fancy talk again. See if it’ll work this time!” Daniel retorted.

“Will you let me finish please?” Peter replied with a veneer of professionalism.

“Alright, go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

“Thank you. I’m trying to say that Rose was complicated—”

“Sir,” Daniel interrupted him addressing the judge. “He’s going off on tangents again, and he’s never gonna explain himself. He’s done this with me, and everyone else. The fact is: he’s guilty! That’s the last time—”

“Yes,” the judge said impatiently. “I feel foolish in having let him go off on this tirade for so long. Everything has been solidified. There is nothing more to discuss—”

“Sir, wait!” Peter said.

“Peter Rawson is sentence to four months in federal prison. Get him out of here.”

“What?!” Daniel exclaimed, as various wasplike officials came to take Peter away.

“We feel that since he has become such an influential, intellectual member of our community, we should give him some leniency,” the judge replied with dreary eyes.

“Some leniency?! Is that what you just said?!” Daniel slammed his fists on the podium. The girl and her parents stood up in furious protest, as Peter followed his superiors with calmness and graciousness.

“He should be executed!” the father shouted. “He should have been killed long ago!”

“This is abominable,” Peter muttered under his breath. “People have cheapened in this privileged society.”

Peter felt that his dreams had been barraged, at least temporarily, with the shallowness of this slick and unimaginative climate. He was glad that it at least showed some favor and mercy, though he hated that it had taken so long to reach this point. He felt that the possibility of retribution was being watered down by these traditionalists, particularly the protestors, who wanted America the way it was originally. Why had they been so fond of calling themselves radicals, even though they tried to revive aspects of history too oppressive for him to bear? Their gynocentric aesthetic was also amusing to him, since it seemed pretentious and decadent, allowing angry young men to find too much solace in stupid fantasies, offered by these Bohemian lunatics. What he had to offer was something that perhaps needed to blossom with time and reconcile with his victims eventually.

Chapter Eight:

The dream-catcher outside the hospital window, dangled like some hallowed, prehistoric bird with a circular net of transparency, through which its innermost nature could be seen. The axiom, “Life must be lived forward but understood backward”, became evermore palpable during Andrew’s last hours. He was the boy who had been taken to the paramedics, on Thursday, October 1^st. His nervous system had become so configured by the struggle for survival, that his body relived the events that led him here. Whenever the nurses, two middle-aged women, spoke when he was at rest and his eyes were half-closed, he sometimes thought it was Adam Rowe’s voice. But reality corrected the malfunction in his spirit, as he awoke to his senses through distinct recognitions: the beatitude of tonality and impersonal civility, imbued with tinges of coyness. None of these could he attribute to his greatest enemy.

When Andrew finally passed on, he accepted the possibilities that followed in his shadow, though he failed to conceive of how to actualize them. He knew he would cross paths with Dmitri Sokolov, and that he wandered not that far from him. But unlike Dmitri, he couldn’t ever return to his body, a fact he instinctually knew. As he followed the clan of nymphs down a valley, travelling through the cavernous hills, he noticed small cloaked and hooded figures coming out from behind bushes or retreating under the shades of poplar trees. The sunshine sometimes caused a vibrational ring in his ears, as a mint aroma filled the windy air.

         The women were all of Anastassya’s breed, in their features and antiquated attire, some with quilts and others with tropical-looking dresses, flamboyantly colored in yellow and bright-green, sometimes with streaks of purple. When they all descended into the earth, Andrew asked, “Where are you taking me?”, which aroused uncomfortable expressions from them, while some grinned with tentativeness that he at first misinterpreted as dismissive and patronizing. Shivering in the cold, they made their way silently into the earth. He expected the stench he knew from tunnels of the city, but was instead met with the damp smell of soil that satiated the darkness.

         Andrew oddly found no desire to return home anymore, since his conditioning had gone through a centennial’s worth of change. This newness alarmed the conservative hermit within him, who tried to drag him down and keep him wheezing and clutching, perpetually blind to himself. He was gloriously surprised when they saw Anastassya emerge from a tunnel beside them. She took his hand as if she intuitively knew what his ordeal had been. He leapt into her arms and began shaking violently, yearning for her reassurance. She was wearing a vermillion dress that made her breasts more prominently noticeable, as a luxurious pillow for him to rest on as his passions trudged through several brief stages, the first denial, the second vicious dread and the third elation. Her body had somehow carried a seed of potential, which projected a goldmine from himself that his inexperience had never allowed previously.

“Is this real?” he asked, looking up at her tearfully. He had been spun in circles by the drug-induced psychosis, which plagued him during his lifetime and caused a present skepticism about his own senses.

“Yes,” Anastassya said, “This will all be over soon. We’ve learned much more than what we’ve been ready for, but I feel that if we hadn’t it would be too late.”

Andrew didn’t wish to inquire about these statements, since he needed to let his mind rest and rejuvenate, letting it absorb the present with mere dilution and osmosis, keeping the past and future at a safe distance. He put his face in her hair and inhaled its perfume, and felt the curvature that had haunted him ceaselessly. With a slightly playful gesture, she stopped him as they began travelling deeper through the tunnel.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked, gulping.

          “We have to show you what you’ve been wanting to see. I know that this seems like too much of a burden now, but we don’t have much of a choice.”

         They began seeing bases and the notorious, malcontented loiterers who spat on the ground and spoke to themselves in grating whispers. Whenever they caught sight of the androgynous beings among them, they cowered and moved away quickly. The clownishly repulsive traits of these entities induced the most rebellious impulses with him, but he knew he couldn’t act on them since he was found to this invisible state in which his only advantages were his powers of observation, and the aid of these women. Some of the beings seemed particularly cabaret, with their purple lipstick and shaved heads, worsened by their frilled clothing that occasionally, when exposing their skin, revealed eyes on their hips, back or shoulders. Their tonality had such a ghastly resonance in this underworld, in which hope was some strained platitude that was elastically spread over inaction.

         They soon reached a Dionysian ritual, beside a gigantic basin. The beings were dancing in writhing motions, some accompanied by young boys who looked about his age. A massive fire was in the center of the basin’s surface, from which pink and golden embers emerged, while Marcus Griffith stood on the balcony directly above it with his arms outspread and his skeletal visage entirely still. Andrew began to notice a lamblike quality, though not tremulous, in the beings’ cries as they moved in ecstasy. Then, a miracle of illogical and inexplicable proportions came over him, as he returned to his physical body, fully alive and well but filled with the deepest bewilderment he had ever felt, slowly piecing together his experience through the aid of his prior knowledge, which had been rendered incomplete beforehand by the white lies of this organization. He had only known of their spirituality, but not much of how systematic and politicized it was, and the ways that it tied into their legal corruption and brutality.

Andrew was receiving an abdominal x ray, during which Dr. Abigail felt for any lesions inside him, using clear and transparent pads that were absorbed into her fingertips. He kept his experience to himself, as he came to the realization that all the rumors about the organization were true. Dr. Abigail instructed him to follow her into a room nearby, in which he had to bathe in a blue substance that he couldn’t identify, while she watched his progress and scribbled in her notebook, noting any aberrations in the giant scan on the wall that exposed more of his internal process. Simultaneously, Andrew felt his entrails becoming more oxygenated, as two Chinese, female nurses in their thirties entered and discussed the various medical procedures with Dr. Abigail. Their innocent looks were a kind of therapy for the wholeness of his being, recollecting itself with exhilarating agony.

 “How many x rays have there been so far?” one of them asked the doctor.

“Six. We have to do two more to ensure that there is no residual, neurological damage that might be connected to it. He seems coherent so far, like he’s on the right track. We just need to do some more tests for his mental abilities, to see whether everything is back to normal.”

“We’ve done of those with him before,” replied the nurse. “It seems like he still has sufficient memory and facial recognition, as well as the ability to solve logistical puzzles. The psychological trauma is the biggest issue left, which I don’t know how he will handle. In many of these instances, it has become very hard to reintegrate with society, and feel that people can connect with others without causing some sort of rift or misunderstanding. It can be painfully awkward, and I want to save him from all that somehow. I just don’t know how. Can you think of any solutions?”

“I’m afraid to take the psychiatric route, since there are so many unscrupulous figures in that department,” replied Dr. Abigail. “They are all too political, but that’s a completely different story.”

“I’ve worked with Maxim Sokolov before,” said the other nurse. “In addition to being a federal officer and forensic psychologist, he is also a psychologist for kids and teenagers, and his approach is incredibly useful and trustworthy. He’s an extremely well-educated man and I think he will be a great asset to him.”

“Isn’t his son that famous artist?”

“Yes. They both come from a line of influential people. They understand people this kid’s age in particular, which has become a rarity, I must admit. Give Andrew a few years with Maxim and he’ll be able to reintegrate with his friends and his community with ease. Maxim is also not the kind of person who uses strictness and ascetism to get his patients to turn around, which has unfortunately become a part of the norm as well.

“Another thing I’ve discovered recently, which I’ve never considered before. . .” the doctor said hesitantly, “is that these so-called ‘near-death experiences’ that our patients have had, are actually products of a misfiring in the brain, caused by those poisonous drugs they were given. The same happened with Dmitri. The serious injury he got exacerbated the toll the drugs already had on his liver and his cognitive, psychological functioning. Therefore, he spent days in the illusion of wandering outside his body, and now he’s luckily survived to tell the tale.”

“But how is it possible that these people can access information about real political secrets, events and conspiracies if it is all in their head?”

“These people have subliminal knowledge of these things, which trauma has walled off because it has been associated with events they can’t process and accept. So, when they finally come to terms with reality, it is like a visionary experience that is being controlled by something outside themselves, even though it isn’t. In other words, these victims have all the answers. They have what we need. We just need to listen, and not write them off as just raving lunatics.

“And when it comes to these large-eyed women who the victims have talked about having seen in their visions, I have an answer for why they have become so powerful and prevalent: based on the research I’ve done, they are a physical and biological species that are exclusively female, but who have been deified and called spirits by members of the occult. It has been proven that people in heightened states of stress or who have undergone ritualistic brainwashing or abuse, have had hallucinations of these women. In the case of these victims, the poison’s effects on their pineal gland have given them a manic-depressive dependence on these so-called ‘spirits’, sometimes conflicted with a nihilistic outlook.”

In the silvery, lustrous detail of the scan, the nurses saw the heightened activity in Andrew’s pineal gland, which resembled a luminous cloud of cells that amorphously conjoined, splitting apart intermittently. Dr. Abigail then pulled a vial of clear liquid from the cupboard, and within it they saw a miniature member of this species, naked and swimming in gliding motions.

“I took a nanotechnologically enhanced DNA sample, and this is what I got,” said Dr. Abigail. She pulled black-and-white, fuzzy photographs from the counter, which had been taken in night-vision mode. “All the features match,” she said as she pointed at the images.

Igor’s Remorse

Once Igor reached the end of the hallway, he was reticent to linger in this hellhole any longer, as it pressed his past into his skull too firmly. The ocean and the dismal halls reminded him of Rose’s suicide, which conflicted with his resentment toward Dmitri. In spite of being harrowed with guilt, he was also self-satisfied on a level too abstract for goodness to fathom, as it fed on the dregs of Peter’s platitudes. It was the first time he felt his own coldness, almost as a physical disease that might, at any moment, rear its jaundiced head. Though he wandered beneath the seafloor, he still heard the currents and foghorns above, while his memories landed upon a key event before her tragedy. The year she died Dmitri held an evening Christmas party, during which Igor heard Peter and Katya arguing in the attic. While Igor gulped down several glasses of champagne, he concernedly eavesdropped on Peter’s vile voice, which slipped into a monotone whenever his boundaries were tested.

Shifting to a normal intonation, Peter shouted, “Katya, we’re all under a lot of pressure right now, alright? We’d appreciate it if you kept your mouth shut and let the grownups handle this!”

“Why are you paranoid about an eleven-year-old?!” Katya cried. “I mean—for god sake, you’re scaring me! What’s gotten into you?!”

“Katya, listen to me!” Peter growled.

“Don’t grab me!”

“Shut up! I swear to God, I will—”

“What?! What are you gonna do?!” Katya yelled, weeping.

When Dmitri heard this, he ran furiously past Igor who was standing hunched and brooding below the stairs, tightly holding his glass while hoping it wouldn’t crack. His eyebrow raised in a trancelike manner, as Dmitri hurried upstairs and Peter berated Katya, “You’ve got guts, I’ll tell you that!”

“That’s it!” Dmitri screamed, as he slammed into the attic. “You made it Peter! Get the hell out!”

“We’re discussing something important. Would you please give us some space?” Peter said in a posh tone.

“Leave now!”

“See?! All you’ve gotta do is scream like a banshee, and everyone comes to the rescue! Where’s fucking Superman when I beg for mercy, huh?! Where’s the fucking SWAT team?! Wanna answer that?!” Peter screamed at Katya, his voice becoming nasal and unusually harsh.

“Get away from me!” Katya wept.

Igor suddenly formed the stance of a young boy, listening to his parents’ altercation. He heard a glass object of some sort, being thrown against the wall. Peter charged out of the room, hurried brusquely down the stairs and disappeared into the living room’s crowd, looking for colleagues with whom he could share his sob story. Dmitri and Katya followed, hounding after him with crazed determination, the kind that comes when part of one’s soul has resigned, while the rest is heated with cougarlike instinct.

“No games, Peter! Come on! I want you out of here now!” Dmitri bellowed, as he hurried through the crowd and Katya wiped the tears from her cheeks. Igor watched with his lip curled, as Peter lunged at Dmitri and threw him to the floor. He tried to punch Dmitri but was overpowered by his superior strength, as many friends and family members gasped, while others begged them to stop. The character Mortimer’s athletic build was modelled after Dmitri’s, and generally gave Peter’s classism greater ammunition, as he scorned what he thought was an apish rudeness. Dmitri pinned Peter to the floor and repeatedly punched him in the face, until Maxim pulled Dmitri off and Daniel dragged Peter towards the front door.

The Blue Tablets

Dr. Abigail pulled out a container of bright, pale-blue oval pills, from the cabinet beneath the needles and equipment. As she handed it to him, he recognized these tablets as the ones he had been given as part of his treatment, during his first appointment. But in his early stages of illness, pills with far more potence were implemented. Their role was also more complex, assisting with brain and liver function, hydration and oxygenation. As always, they presently originated from powdered chemicals, and each tablet contained a microchip fueled by the same energy as the bases.

“Since your sickness is down to the very mild stages, and it’s almost gone, I figured that these would be the most suitable,” she said. “These will help with the residual nausea you get at night. Other than that, I think we’re finished for today.” Dmitri got out bed and put on his coat, thanking her for the sanity she provided. He said goodbye and departed. When he opened the door and entered the hot sunshine, his gait lost the stiffness of inquiry and anticipation. His dismal expectations had been countered by her reassurance.

Meanwhile, Daniel was still in a separate room, speaking to Monica about his poor health. Even nowadays, he had to take the very potent pills, and though they induced the same feeling that Dmitri experienced several years ago, his emotions were not sensual. Rather, they were a mix of thrill and discomfort, as he felt himself stumbling at the threshold of metamorphosis. He wished to believe she might change his ways, through some spontaneous flight of wisdom and kinship, and yet was faced with the impersonal nature of her pursuits. Vapid somberness shone in his mouth, which hung somewhat ajar before the doctor as she spoke. He was sitting at the side of his bed, relentlessly tapping the small round table with his finger while he looked down with callow churlishness. She tried to hide her annoyance, as she said in a refined voice, “Based on what our scans have indicated, your brain is still affected by the hallucinogenic, even though the hallucinations are gone—”

“Well, I can’t say they’re gone entirely,” he said feebly. “I’ve still been hearing Peter Rawson’s voice—it’s always that monotone, you know the one he gets occasionally? The voice says, ‘Is this the path you’ve chosen?’ I think he was the one in that cell with me, the day I was given the dehydrant. He may have been the one who administered it.”

“Have you been experiencing any other symptoms?”

“I threw up a couple times this year, which has been the pattern.”

“That’s odd. Your liver wasn’t nearly as damaged as Dmitri’s, but you’re taking much longer to recover. . . Your lifestyle is the only explanation for this. It can’t be anything else.”

Daniel sighed and said, “What should we do about the toxin now? Is there something else that might make it go away faster?”

“Yes,” she said with unintentional sharpness, as she jotted down notes in her small book. She then got up and told him to follow her, at which he rose reluctantly. They went through a hallway, and took an elevator down to the subterranean passageways. Various wine cellars, and electrical and medical storage rooms were scattered throughout the hallway. They then arrived at a room he recognized from his hospitalization, which occurred right after his incarceration. His sentence ended when he was fourteen, at which his cynicism gained more depth and fourth dimension, as a devilish impulse that transcended him forward, feeling no queries about what he left behind.

Daniel was presently told to remove all his clothes, including his underwear, and stand in the stall at the end of the room. He felt that familiar pang of mortification, a sense of grotesque loneliness in the command of her voice. The sound of the metal door closing, still percolated in his consciousness as a nervous, sophomoric smile appeared on his face, which became stranger when he swallowed one of the blue pills she gave him. His expression tranquilized, while humiliation still dug into the seat of his instincts, struggling blindly to perceive the numinous. The stall’s griminess was compensated by an ambrosial scent that filled the room, as his mind saw people in the gray texture of the bricks: elderly figures in the foggy roughness. He recalled this whole procedure, from when he was here last. At that time, his doctor was Jane Marlowe, a woman who looked nineteen while her actual age was unknown. Her pointed face looked grim and exhausted, as her vermillion nail polish was dry and patchy.

Dr. Hallworth took a few clear, transparent sheets from the cabinet on their left, and put one on his forehead, one on his stomach, and one on each shoulder. She then pushed a yellow button on the wall to their right, and a quiet, high-pitched noise came from the ceiling. On the sheets, scans of his entrails looked just as real as they would if seen by a surgeon, except that the software made them silvery and iridescent. These kinds of scans detected and healed, using vibrational frequencies that altered and fluctuated. The other kinds were used annually, mostly with disappointing results.

Ten minutes into Dr. Hallworth’s search, Daniel began perspiring from detoxification, his knees quaking.

“Are you alright? Do you need a glass of water?” she asked.

“No, I feel great,” he said. “I feel much better than I have for a while.”

Igor Sokolov

Meanwhile, Peter was standing outside the lounge, next to the doorway while conversing with Griffith.

“This place reminds me of being a teenager, even though I’ve never been here,” Peter said with a deadened expression. “It’s that old feeling that I’m being surveilled. It’s claustrophobic with all these performing monkeys, flaunting their decadence, talking about me behind my back. They sometimes have this ghetto jargon, which seems more common for the rich than the poor nowadays. I can’t understand them. The pressure’s too much here anyway. It’s gonna give me a headache.”

Griffith chuckled. “You don’t know what pressure is, Peter. Even I see that.”

Peter was silent and then replied, “Yes, I guess I’ve been good at faking it.”

“You know, you’re a boy at heart. Everyone says that about Daniel, but I think it’s actually true for you,” Griffith said with strange warmth.

Chapter Three:

After Daniel arrived home that night, he heard Igor’s still small voice behind him, “You’re just like the rest. I wish I hadn’t been such a fool. I would have prepared better if I’d given myself the chance, or if you had.”

“What does that even mean?” Dmitri turned around impatiently.

Blank ecstasy filled Igor’s glare, as he wrung his hands in a mousy manner.

“Oh, you’re gonna play these games, I see—you’re gonna torture me for longer. I wish Peter had set the dogs on you.”

Dmitri painfully studied him. “I don’t even recognize you anymore. This is absurd. You must tell me you’ve reflected on everything that’s happened. . . I know you’re in there somewhere.”

Dmitri realized that in these few seconds, he had denied that his brother’s behavior was nothing new or incongruous. A childish search for strength and sensibility, had won his senses as he stood before him.

“Come on, give me a chance,” Igor replied.

“For what? None of this has been about you. It’s too late, anyway. What’s there to argue about?”

“You’re right. I guess there isn’t. Why am I here? Why am I doing this?” Igor laughed with a hollow smile, spreading out his arms. “You’ve got this all figured out. You’ve got all the answers.”

“You had all the answers, but you did nothing,” Dmitri said sternly.

Igor shook his head and laughed again, beginning to pace with his hands at his hips.

“All I have asked of you was to show a little determination, but you’ve wallowed instead,” Igor said, his tone becoming still again. “You go ahead living in your fantasy, pretending I don’t exist.”

“The problem is I can’t just pretend,” Dmitri replied, tense and somewhat hoarse. “Now tell me, what is It that you want?”

“I want you to buck up and show some spirit. You’re dragging everybody down and boasting about your accomplishments. You barely pay attention to me. I’m struggling out here in the real world, while you rest in your laurels or moan about your wife. When you are gonna move on?!”

“How on Earth have you come to those conclusions?! You even talk about Peter as if he’s still your friend! As far as I’m concerned, he’s dead to all of us—he ran off like the rat scumbag he is! He’s nobody! But you see him like a father! And now you’re bringing me into this! You wanna drag me down with you! Well I’m not going there!” He stormed into his mansion and slammed the door, gulping with agitation and bewilderment. His life prior to Nadya’s death still seemed illusory and irretrievable, as if joy had been hubris and salvation suspect. Had these tricks been bound to expire? Or if they weren’t insane concoctions, would his former self ever seem real again? It deserved the repose that petty tyrants butchered, as he had wasted his energy and wore himself thin.

In the morning was Dmitri’s monthly visit to Dr. Abigail, who treated the liver damage caused by a hallucinogenic many years ago, at the hands of Griffith’s followers. Like each appointment was conducted ever since his first, he lay on a blanket-less bed with the bottom of his shirt raised to just below his chest, from back to front. He vividly recalled that during his first visit, at the age of fourteen, her treatment caused a soothing sensation in his stomach, as if it had been mended by an exotic consistency, a potion he had drunk. Her presence eroticized this sensation, in a similar vein to his dreams two years prior. It complemented his partial bareness, with an air of power that stood over him. Her large round glasses and impeccable features, were bright with half-feigned formalism, quietly proud and inward-gazing. She looked about twenty-three, and in her voice was possessive vivacity.

But like Daniel, his past was rent and buried by repression, allowing random pieces into his mental vicinity.

“How are you feeling these days?” she asked.

“I’ve been struggling, as you might expect,” he replied, slurring his words while trying to hide the tremor in his voice. “But I’m getting much stronger. I’m much more alert, and I can concentrate far better. The sick feelings have gone away completely. I’m just not sure about the remains of the toxin itself. I hope it will no longer be a concern at all by the end of this month.”

“Well, based on our scans it looks like you’re in good shape. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t over by then,” she replied. “The swelling has decreased tremendously.”

Dmitri sighed with relief, his hand twitching once in remaining traces of anxiety.

“This has all just been an epic joke. I was worried I’d get to another fork in the road, but it looks like there’s hope,” he said, yawning. “I’ve certainly gotten my physical strength back, lifting weights and trying to be as levelheaded as possible. I think that’s infectious, you know?” He felt that he bordered on revealing passions too personal and irrelevant, at which he asked, “What is the next step? What should I do now?”

Part 3 of Daniel Short Story

“I often wonder what will happen to me in the next ten years, and where I’ll be, figuratively speaking,” he said insolently. “You ever think about that?”

The woman to the left giggled awkwardly, trying to hide contempt. “N-No . . . What do you mean?”

“Times are changing so quickly. When Daniel and his parents came along, I thought there’d be no hope. Let’s put it this way: they’re the types who believe that they’re special without ever having to sweat, suffer or work for anything, unlike me. I always knew I had to earn my way. I was just misunderstood, that’s all.”

The two women already looked bored.

“You guys aren’t listening, are you?”

“You always sound like you’re reading off a script,” the other one said, laughing.

“Nevermind, forget it,” he said disdainfully. After pausing and looking at the menu, he asked, “So, what’s for dinner?”

“I don’t want anything.” She yawned irritatedly.

“My appetite’s fading in and out,” said the other girl, avoiding his gaze.

Peter smiled in a vein that would look like wistfulness in ordinary people, yet in him it was peculiar and unpitiable. Daniel continued strolling for a while, until he reentered the metropolis down a sidewalk paved with ice. He detected a ghastly tension in the atmosphere, and heard distant bells and hooves. Every abrasive tone or gesture he noticed in the crowds, whether it was a sweep of the hand or loiterers’ loud exclamations, startled him in his vigilance. He soon heard a girl’s voice repeatedly screaming for help, from an alleyway between apartment buildings. Such cries had a grotesqueness that even surpassed melodrama, and through his head crossed a line from The Importance of Being Ernest, “We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place.”

Daniel then saw a girl a few feet away, about ten or so, in the alleyway as she struggled against a group of men who had seized her. Once he ran into the alley, he recognized them as some of Griffith’s accomplices, with their five-o’clock shadows and cavalier attire. Unlike Griffith, Peter and some of the others, these breeds of classism tried to appeal to the common man, through a pretense that baited the mentally unsound. Their plain t-shirts and pants, torn and filthy, flaunted cheapness and pathology. The girl’s owlish face and tormented gestures were the sole authenticity among them. As the rest ripped off her clothes, a man held her from behind while small shards of his broken glasses fell on her.

As another stepped in front of her and unzipped his pants, Daniel pulled a knife from his coat and, with a contorted wrath that surfaced all over him, he stabbed him through the back to his chest. In the vacuum of time leading up to this climax, during his adulthood but otherwise indeterminable, he had kept this weapon on him everywhere he went, in case these creatures interfered with him or others. Though this likelihood was low, he wished to prove his manhood by taking advantage of his own inadequacy, in all its sour aimlessness, though he knew it could never be truly redefined.

The man he defeated gasped horribly, as his callow features surveyed the sky and the world he had neglected with assumptions, and he collapsed as the girl fought more fiercely to escape. Daniel heard and saw onlookers opening their windows, showing alarm in silhouetted paralysis. The rest of the attackers ran at Daniel and one of them pushed him to the wall while the man in broken glasses gripped onto her, with a parental insistence in his pursed lips. Daniel dropped his weapon in this process, and was locked in by a stranger with a large, dark and straggly beard, on which tears trickled down as he held a knife to his throat. He said sanctimoniously, “You insufferable prick! Do you know how many years I’ve watched you strut around here?”

“Let’s just get this over with, you fucking clown,” Daniel retorted in a gravelly voice. “I don’t want any of your long soliloquys.” He attempted to point the knife at the lunatic’s throat, but it pricked him after being aggressively retargeted.

“S-See that girl over there? L-Look at her! Look at her! Just take a moment, and look at her.” Daniel complied and witnessed convulsions that he hadn’t seen before.

“What?” he said, perplexed and frustrated.

“This is what you’ve made!”

“You’re not making any sense. I don’t even know who she is.”

“This is what you’ve all created!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!”

“You know exactly what I mean. . . Meditate on it during your last moments.”

“I’m not meditating on anything, fuckhead. Make your point. I have a lot to do tonight, and I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow. You seem like you’ve got something to say, so say it. You have my full attention.”

In a dreary, nervous and inattentive way, the stranger changed the subject, “But I won’t stop loving her.” He tried not to sob as his lips trembled.

“That’s not an answer.”

The man was responseless as he carried a deep, calculating desperation, fishing inward with frenzy. He then tried to slit Daniel’s throat, but was overcome by his grip this time as the blade sliced his pasty, hell-worn flesh. He fell dead and Daniel picked up his own knife, proceeding to brawl and kill the rest as the girl stood transfixed. During the gang’s attempted crime, her life until then had seemed illusory and irretrievable, as if joy had been vanity bound to expire. The imminence of violation was a rite of passage, into a false humbleness that discounted all she knew and trusted, but her will for self-preservation had not become negotiable. Yet now, as the past became palpable again, her rescue brought it a unified coherence.

When Daniel was finished, he was breathless as he gazed at her with a mischievous smile. But her exhausted and reflective presentation, eventually dissolved his happiness. It inspired him to end his friendship with Dmitri, who was his noble and levelheaded mentor. His pleas and lectures tried to seize Daniel from his unhealthy path, yet Daniel’s anarchism misperceived his virtues, calling them supercilious. After the horrors he just experienced, Dmitri’s nagging voice would seem too petty to endure. Letting moral commanders go to their graves, pampered and unchallenged, was his second last refuge. What would follow he apprehended to consider.

 

 

Part Two of Daniel Short Story

During adolescence and adulthood, Daniel was slightly corpulent from his grief and overindulgence, except his visage that maintained its masculine vigor. Heavy liquors gave the sensation that his rejection of the occult and the establishment, had exiled him into the ways of a bottom-feeder, incomprehensible to simplehearted people. His fondness for fried desserts and meats, sometimes accompanied this vice. He thought of a biblical passage spoken by God to Satan, after he tempted Eve toward the fall, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”

When he was twenty, his suffering was suppressed beneath cynical mirth. On a wintry night full of bustling crowds, he watched the shallow waters froth and bubble. Their intensity mimicked boiling, due to the subaquatic, underground bases near the seashore, ridding the toxins the cult had left from its malpractices. Their white, fanlike noise resembled an angel’s exhalation, making his skin crawl as he traversed beside the waves. Each one was self-automated, and fueled by energy that expelled the dehydrants from the water. In these circumstances, the drugs had been designed as invisible, permeable gases, now so weakened by the bases that this area was declared sanitary, no longer prohibited as it was a month ago. Some spots were even perfectly uncontaminated.

Daniel noticed Peter Rawson sitting at one of the tables, in front of a pub called Blue Minister. He was one of Griffith Alliance’s elites, who taught at his school John Wright High. His whitish blond hair and freckled, triangular face, gave his impersonal soul a daunting appearance, worsened by an occasional monotone. What infuriated Daniel to this day, was that many female teachers, pretty and eloquent, supported and admired this wretch, in spite of the way he treated women while banded with his organization. He was presently accompanied by two girls who looked a couple years older than Daniel, with jeans, vermillion bikinis and mousy, dreamy demeanors that, in comparison, made him spiritually hideous, as the decaying anatomy is in sunlight.

Without bothering to be inconspicuous, Daniel decided to eavesdrop on their conversation. With a smirk forming as he furrowed his brow, he approached the table with his head swimming as he struggled to keep his balance, and stopped a few feet away from them. Peter’s eyes were nonreciprocal while they briefly landed on him, haughtily ignoring his curious presence. They left no window to look into his private affairs, with an abandonment Daniel felt only the male sex was capable of.

(Untitled) Daniel Short Story Part 1

What was embedded in most, drifted along the wayside of Adrian’s trajectory, nearly becoming a conscience but reigned by his presumptions. He felt the world owed him everything, as his caustic unresolvedness devoured months and years, while isolating himself from those he deemed inconvenient. This habit undoubtedly increased, and like gaping clams in deserted waters, his inner voices beckoned him toward implosion, while beside him whimpered the lost self that only suspect practices made reachable. Like his friend Dmitri Sokolov, his interest in the occult caused his childhood birth of sexuality, bringing peace that aligned him with what he neglected. The truth spoke in a form that seemed evil in its beginning stages, until its tune changed with maturation. During the year he and his companions were tortured, at the same age but at different times and places, the two were engrossed in the seductresses of classical art, from the 12^th to the 19^th century. These women were spectral muses who lived since before the human race.

Daniel Schroder, on the other hand, hated the occult and felt no attraction to them. Though they were not associated with Griffith Alliance, his knowledge about it still repelled him from these matters, compiled with his anti-authoritarianism. His friendship with Adrian and Dmitri, brought catharsis through their hardships. They bemoaned the rising perversion, as images of these spirits were slowly replaced with those of the androgynous beings. An oil painting that stirred them most, shared the title of the book Adrian found, “Death of the Old World.” Its photographic realism bleakened its banality, as a fraud might show cruelness through self-pitying adages. The picture portrayed a man with a nose-less, slender face, and his head slightly tilted to the side. Except his seemingly cabaret eyebrows, even thinner than Adrian’s perpetrator’s, he was completely hairless and trapped in a white strait jacket, with a touch of brooding narcissism. In the dimness were a light-blue, ceramic brick tile wall and floor, on which he sat and leaned against.

Before becoming acquainted with Adrian, the other two were tortured because of shouting death threats at Griffith Alliance, calling them hypocrites and degenerates while standing outside the monastery’s entrance at midnight. (A few hours prior, Daniel introduced Dmitri to alcohol and intoxication). Through the window they saw the charlatan congregation, in a large hall with a chandelier above them. The cult leader was Marcus Griffith, who stormed over to the window with his usual youthful nimbleness, which seemed manic with his hollow, angry grin. His aged body made this all the more of a spectacle, as his long, square and sunken countenance had shifted out of role. He was no longer the magician of platitudes and hearsay, since the raucous stripped him down to the savage he was.

The hallucinogenic dehydrants later imposed on Daniel and Dmitri, were pink oval tablets that induced the revulsion of staring at food excessed with richness, as their color somehow penetrated the nature of their effect. Was it just their harsh, saccharine brightness that set their subjects on edge, or was it also the unexplained chemistry these lifeless forms encapsulated? One was distributed to each, and after swallowing came the illness and pains that they notoriously inflicted. What differed from Adrian’s predicament, was that they vomited ten minutes in. A maddening feeling lingered after their incarceration, on the cusp of the euphoria when a traumatized body enters shock. Whenever they reached this rapture in rare occurrences, they shivered and withdrew from others till normalcy resumed.

Alastair Greene

Characters

 Alastair – Army sergeant with anti-spiritual philosophy that influences his subjects.

Adrian – One of the soldiers who is troubled by his influence.

Carl – Friend of Alastair

John – Foolish, naïve simpleton who is exploited by these people.

 SCENE 1:

(Evening. Purple light from setting sun, pouring through three windows above dining room table. A painting of a brown-haired woman, nineteen or twenty, with sunken eyes and a concerned, dreamy expression is to the right of the table. She is holding a lamb in her arms, as she stands beside a pink nightlight. Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nacht” is playing in the background. The sound of wind is heard from outside, as well as the sounds of footsteps. Alastair and Carl are sitting at the dining room table, eating and looking disgruntled. Alastair then grins, looking up at Carl).

 

ALASTAIR: Adrian has certainly changed even over these past few months. Haven’t you noticed? Most people call it self-destruction, but I call it a harsh renewal that has turned him inside out. He’s exactly who he never wanted to admit, as if it was so taboo. Frankly, I think it suits him better. It’s much easier than starting from scratch.

 

CARL:  And who is this person you’ve turned him into?

 

ALASTAIR: He’s become violent, trained and indifferent to the life he once had. This fulfills the vision I had always obsessed over and hoped for. I wish I had not almost killed myself over this. I feel like I’ve wasted half my existence, and I often teased myself, accusing myself of being too cruel and far-fetched, but all of us have questioned ourselves unnecessarily at the cusp of some important endeavor. (Chuckles and pauses) Part of this whole military project, has been to get rid of all the sentimental bullshit these people grew up with. Human beings are biological machines; they don’t have souls. Once they realize this, they can unlock their will and do anything they previously thought unimaginable.

 

CARL: (Laughs) Well, that’s absurd. You’re setting yourself up for creating a bunch of lethargic, aimless simpletons like the ones we’ve had to endure before. How will this time be any different?

 

ALASTAIR: Well this time, we’ll get them to think. We won’t settle for less. We’ve already made great strides. Adrian refuses to communicate with his family anymore, since they constantly demand that he turn his circumstances around, otherwise he’ll slip back into his addictive patterns again, resorting to alcoholism and self-pity. But they obviously have no understanding of people. Like all the other soldiers, he needs to have just enough purpose to not go insane, but no so much purpose that he starts to doubt himself and watch what is changing so rapidly inside him.

 

CARL: That is quite clever, I must admit. I can see how this has forced Adrian to step outside his comfort zone. Now he’s become much bolder. He’s always toying with John, that buffoon who, frankly, is easily manipulated, and has brought on a lot of this shit himself. Adrian knows exactly what buttons to push, and what he overlooks. Adrian’s already swindled him and his family into poverty, while John is clueless about the cause of his predicament. He’s not aware of how competitive the world really is, and therefore, he assumes the best in everyone. He’s talkative as hell too, as if he’s so absorbed in whatever consumes him at any given moment, that he forgets about others. He’s that classic clown who would stride off a cliff, if distracted by some temptation. A part of me often wants to step in and save him, and another part of me wants him to fall or drown.

 

ALASTAIR: Well, he’s not worth the energy. He’ll continue to be the sentimentalist who hides from his responsibilities, and only does what he is instructed. Childhood will never end for him, even though he’s grown. I just wish he would shut up sooner and stay out of everyone else’s business. Why is he so amazed by everything? It’s like he’s lived in a cave up until now, and he’s seeing the world for the first time. At his age, I was mellow, strategic and I chose my battles well. I knew how to get what I wanted from others. They weren’t just there for me to talk at, or lean onto when my circumstances became too difficult, only to be kicked in the face. (Laughs) Adrian and his friends always ridicule him, whenever he shows up for their gatherings, blabbering about some stupid subject. They’ve even threatened him twice. Times are changing. People like John used to keep society safe, guarded and untouched, while everyone was clueless and abstract, filled with the notions I talked about. Now he’s at the bottom of the food chain, ready to be swallowed up by those who refuse to back down.

 

CARL: Trust me, I understand. I remember when I used to be exactly like him. I turned around when I realized there was so much more ahead of me. I just had to give it a chance.

 

(Lights fade).

 

SCENE TWO:

 

(Night. John is standing by lamp post and bench, while Alastair is in the background, sometimes glancing at him briefly while smoking a cigarette).

 

JOHN: Why does everyone misinterpret my character? What does naïvete mean anymore anyways? It is just a way for people to describe a sharp passion that is too strange for people’s taste, and too inconvenient for them.

 

(John is about to leave when he encounters Adrian and his friends, who enter from stage-right. John meekly gazes at them, who look at him contemptuously for a moment).

 

ADRIAN: (With derisive confusion) What? (Looks to his friends and laughs). He’s quite a character, I tell you. Hopefully we won’t have any surprises tonight.

 

JOHN: (Chuckles nervously, trying to maintain a sense of humor and relaxation) Surprises? What do you mean?

 

ADRIAN: (Walking up to him) Not tonight, John. Come on, time to go.

 

(Alastair is amusedly watching this confrontation from a distance).

 

JOHN: What did I do?

 

ADRIAN: (With deadened eyes) Get the hell out of here, John.

 

JOHN: I’m sorry, have I offended you in some way?

 

(Adrian laughs and shakes his head).

 

ADRIAN: What can I say? It’s always a circus at this hour. Never a dull moment.

 

JOHN: (Smiles awkwardly) Okay, you’re upset. I get it.

 

ADRIAN: Beat it!

 

JOHN: No!

 

(Adrian punches him in the face, and he and his friends attack him and beat him up. John is left lying there, and after they leave, he struggles trying to get up. Once he succeeds, he exits slowly stage-left).

 

SCENE THREE:

 

(Night. John is sitting on a rocking chair by a bed where Margaret, his sick and dying wife is lying. He is attending to his cuts and bruises with a wet cloth).

 

JOHN: To be frank, I always feel Adrian is up to something. Who knows what? I’m tired of trying to read people. Why do they believe they are so important anyways? I am my own man. I have my own priorities. I will waste my time no longer.

 

MARGARET: Why do you say that?

 

JOHN: I can’t explain it exactly. But I’m poor all of a sudden, after he said he’d give me money for this transaction, and he never gave it back. He kept doing this repetitively, and now I’m in debt. He appeared good natured, so I’m at a loss for words.

 

MARGARET: (Scoffs) Good-natured is quite an interesting word for him. He’s always been a shady man. Why you haven’t noticed is beyond me. He’s obviously cheated you, which you can’t afford given your situation. You’ll need all the money you can get. My survival might depend on it. I don’t know how much time I have left.

 

JOHN: But that’s ridiculous! Maybe he’s a little off, but he’s given me more than anyone else has.

 

MARGARET: (Shocked and slightly offended) What has he given you?

 

JOHN: He’s given me friendship . . . but to be honest, he believes things I’ve never heard before. I wish I could articulate them.

 

MARGARET: Well, he’s not what you think, trust me. But I feel sorry for him. When he was a child, he was abused and tortured by these high priests from a secret organization, and now he’s trying to overcompensate for all that by becoming a vampire, metaphorically speaking. No wonder he’s become so cut off from his family. I would lose it if I were him.

 

(Just before John can speak, the door opens stage-right and Rose, John’s sister, bursts in).

 

ROSE: Mom is dead! She was killed last night after her house was pillaged!

 

JOHN: (Gasping as his knees give in) N-No, it can’t be! By who? How did this happen?

 

ROSE: The soldiers! They were part of Alastair’s army, and Adrian was one of them! I saw him! You wouldn’t have believed it!

 

(John runs his fingers through his hair and despairingly clutches it, while sitting and leaning against the wall, while Margaret watches agonizingly).

 

JOHN: No . . . this must be a mistake. . .  (Gets up angrily) That’s not possible! You’re wrong! (Begins weeping) I would never have let . . .

 

ROSE: (Shivering) Let what?

 

JOHN: Why are you doing this to me?! None of this is true! None of it!

 

ROSE: You must believe me!

 

(John bangs the wall with his fists)

 

JOHN: He’s always had my best interests at heart! How dare you!

 

ROSE: John, what’s gotten into you! You’re not making sense!

 

JOHN: Leave! I can’t take this!

 

ROSE: John, you can’t be—

 

(There is silence as John weeps. Lights fade).

 

SCENE THREE:

 

(Night. Adrian’s living room. He is standing on carpet by table with lamp and full wine glass, and gun on table. The wind repeatedly blows through the window, and through the pages in his book and causing them to open repeatedly).

 

ADRIAN: My private life is far more humiliating than flaunting or advertising my weaknesses to others. Each time after dinner I sit in my living room alone, and though I enjoy the place where I can be my most authentic self, I hate the horrid impulses that accompany it. Many years ago, my greed and sluggishness and the anger that counterbalanced it, were modes through which I felt the most blissfully ignorant. They required no plan or vision, and no possibility of future disappointment; they were just surges of meaning, desire and execution, in opposition to the indifference that my gloom induced. I swindled, I hid from others who wanted my sympathy, and I created the most elaborate universe for myself in which no one except me could access. It was barricaded by unfathomable dishonesty, contorted and convoluted reason that, as one could see in my earlier phrases, is a defining feature in my thinking. I have fallen so far down that rabbit hole, since the sergeant has dragged me into the nonsense that my mother always warned me about, and now I feel the regret that I would have preferred to experience when I was ready. Now I idealize remorse, even though I don’t practice it. (Adrian puts gun to his head, hesitates and then lowers it). I feel fainter and closer to giving in. I feel angry at my own determination and will to fight it, since meekness and mediocrity are far more realistic. But I don’t care anymore. I have to fulfill whatever idiocy that has never let me transcend, and I am not giving up. (Adrian staggers towards the couch and sits down. He looks around him in sad confusion, as if he suddenly doesn’t recognize anything around him). Maybe caving in would make matters much easier, since I would have more mental space to give myself the care and comfort that I never thought I deserved, in my perpetual strife for perfection. . . (Adrian puts gun down on table, and lies on the couch while trying to go to sleep. Tosses and turns. A hissing, watery sound appears, followed by the sound of footsteps around him, even though no one is visible. Adrian then appears to be in physical pain, while his eyes are closed. He grimaces and struggles. A red light fills the room, as faces peer through the windows).

 

ADRIAN: (Awakening) Why do I feel my nihilism getting worse? I feel colder and more disconnected, than I ever have. I feel sharp pains throughout my body. What is happening?

 

(He gets up abruptly as all this phenomena disappears, and he paces nervously around, inspecting the room, trying to figure out what was plaguing him).

 

ADRIAN: It must have been a dream.

 

(He tries to go back to sleep, but is awoken by the same pains, and red light fills the room again, and fog emerges from the windows. The ghosts of his victims from war, two boys and a woman who are all wounded in the chest, enter stage-right. Adrian then wails and exits stage-left. Lights fade, and then come back on as he enters Alastair’s bedroom while he is asleep, holding the gun).

 

ADRIAN: (To himself) Would ending him, be the only way out of this? I can’t even tell at this stage, whether he made me stronger or more psychologically vulnerable. Those dualities seem blurred in hysteria, and I don’t know whether to somehow reconcile them, or leave them be. . . But, I-I have no more time left. It’s far too late. (Adrian puts gun to his head, holds it there for a few moments). What am I doing? I should have trusted myself from the beginning. I knew that at some point, I would go in circles and stall at doing what I needed to. I should have seen this trap coming. This is absurd. I’ve given myself way too much credence.

 

(Adrian shoots Alastair and kills him. Lights fade).

 

SCENE FOUR:

 

(Daytime. Ravine. Carl and Adrian are standing by the river).

 

ADRIAN: Carl, I must confess that a lot of transformed in me within a very short period of time. I dare say it has happened overnight.

 

ALASTAIR: What is it?

 

ADRIAN: (Hesitantly) Well, the damage all this training has done to me, has fragmented my personality into elements I find unrecognizable, and I can’t think straight anymore. I can’t control my compulsions, and the wars I’ve been involved in have only exacerbated them. . . It was only last night that I fully realized this. I see now that something intangible exists, which gives my actions significance. But I turned my back on it, all because of how I’ve been conditioned. I can’t carry on like this any longer.

 

(Silence).

 

CARL: This is exactly what I feared. I always knew that at some level, you were fragile. This is why you’ve been so hard to control in some ways, and so easy in others.

 

ADRIAN: Don’t take it like that. I see this as something better for me in the long run.

 

CARL: Don’t pretend you understand anything about life. I know what works. I’ve had enough painful experiences to attest to that.

 

ADRIAN: (Frustratedly) Please listen to me. I know this is difficult. But I must get this across to you before it’s too late, and I completely lose everything that is important to me. I can’t let happen.

 

CARL: All that stuff you held onto, was just a distraction. That’s what you continually fail to see.

 

ADRIAN: (Angrily) Who are you to tell me what’s important? Tell me what horrible experiences you’ve had, which have given you this knowledge!

 

(Carl is uncomfortably silent).

 

ALASTAIR: Don’t test me. I’ve been very patient so far, Adrian. You’re thoughtful, you’re smart but you’re running off the rails. Now if you’ll forgive me—(Alastair begins to walk away and Adrian follows him)’

 

ADRIAN: Alastair, I’m serious. Listen to me! Otherwise I’m done for.

 

CARL: You were done for from the beginning. What were your expectations walking into this? Did you think you would ever get your old self back?

 

ADRIAN: W-Well . . . I-I thought I would get to have some will, some self-control.

 

(They stop stage-left).

 

CARL: Well, perhaps that was convenient to believe, but you must move on now.

 

ADRIAN: No! I can’t! I can’t go on like this!

 

CARL: You’re pathetic! All this whining! You’ve only scratched the surface so far, and you call this brutal?

 

ADRIAN: You can’t honestly say that! ’ve done a lot more than scratch the surface!

 

CARL: Well then why are you so hesitant?! Just jump in if you’re ready!

 

ADRIAN: No! I refuse! I quit!

 

(John enters stage-right and notices them as he is walking by, looking disheveled and perturbed).

 

JOHN: (Approaching Adrian) Tell me it isn’t true!

 

ADRIAN: (Frozen with nervousness) What?

 

(John tries to spit it out, but he can’t. He checks out, icily looking past him while he sits down on a bench, sinking into melancholy contemplation. A look of horror and epiphany appears on Adrian’s face, as he faces audience. Lights fade).