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.