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.
The Specters of Tradition: Volume 1: Daniel Schroder 