Novella about a Targeted Individual Through Archontic Interference & Love Bite Manipulation: a Job|e for the Digital Age: Life in the Simulated Reality Matrix (SRM)
A Job For The Digital Age
Note:
Here is the story, along with my original FB post from 10\11\16 introducing it:
The following is a first-draft novella I wrote last September, 2015. This story was written prior to my having any knowledge of Alien Love-Bite relationships, archon, archontic interference, the false matrix, or anything else of this kind. About a month after I completed this story, my first contact with archontic entities began. The story is true, though names and places and the like have been changed; it tells about the love-bite experience before I knew such a thing existed (which makes the opening quote to the story that much more ironically painful.)
The story details the decade-long period when my life was being interfered with by archontic entities, unbeknownst to me. It wasn’t until after my first contact occurred with the archon on 10\31\15 – about a month after this story was completed – that I came to understand what had been taking place in my life during this time, and explained why everything in my life had gone so horribly wrong, in ways that seemed to defy reality.
The story is self-explanatory, when read with the love-bite and archontic interference in mind, and covers most of what needs to be covered about my life, pre-contact/abduction.
The story is a first-draft. I never got to work on it again, or even read it as a hardcopy proof. As for the story ending: the story never got published (no surprise), and the money did run out. My archontic abduction occurred about a month later, followed by the realisation that I was yet again embroiled in another love bite, and one that exceeds even that which I write about in the story.
Again, keep in mind that this story is describing archontic interference through a love-bite mmarriag, and written before I knew such a thing existed. For this reason, I feel the story is important, because it was written without any knowledge or bias in regard to alien love bite relationships. In writing it, I was simply trying to figure out how it was possible for everything in my life to go so strangely and horribly wrong – and for me to have lost so much. I know the answer now, post 10\31\15: the archon, matrix control system and the love-bite.
I hope you enjoy reading it. And, if anyone would like to publish it – since I’m still destitute – I could use the money. By the way, that title refers to the Biblical Job, not job – though this irony is not missed by me or the archon assigned to me.
Note: songs embedded in the story expand upon the story
A JOB FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
‘How terrible – to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees’
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Katherine and I had been together for eighteen years, twelve of them married. I was father to our son, conceived by Katherine using an implanted embryo created from my sperm and the egg from a young Polish university student who we had selected as our “donor.” In having attended one partner meeting too many, Katherine had missed the deadline of her fertility, so to speak. Infertility was the penalty Katherine had to pay for putting career and success before family. However, in light of Katherine’s infertility, coupled with the many years we had shared together, one might say it was a blessing that we were still able to have a child together, start a family. While it is true that my son is an angel, the person Katherine ultimately revealed herself to be, only two years after my son was born, turned out to be anything but a blessing – for me.
And now, seven years on, my life long since destroyed, the relationship with my son in ruins, living here in Hanoi, eight thousand miles away from what once had been home, the hopes I once had of making a new life for myself have been dashed – with Katherine’s blessings. In less than two weeks I face a life of destitution. But despite the role Katherine played in setting out to destroy my life, had it not been for the existence of the electronic surveillance I uncovered in July 2009, connected to the US government’s mass domestic spying operations, and conducted against its own citizens, as revealed to the world by Edward Snowden – five years after I discovered this for myself – my life might have turned out differently. My name is Peter Didymus Zek. This is my story, strange as it is and as painful as it is for me to tell.
#
Every time I drank the stuff, and it was plenty, bad things happened. It wasn’t the alcohol so much as the dead things that were in it – cobras, vipers, kraits, scorpions, geckos, tarantulas, among other creatures, mostly of the venomous or poisonous variety. Alcohol infused with the death, rice wine, in this case. The stuff was ubiquitous throughout Vietnam and, since I first arrived in Hanoi nearly four years ago, I had drunk my fill of it. Imbibing death in a shot glass, now and then, only seemed natural for a man like me; my decease being what brought me to Vietnam in the first place. And a death no more unnatural than the demise of a snake drowned to death in a jar of grain alcohol, for reasons no less important than giving twisted pleasures to the senses.
I had been out this night with my friend Seamus Finn, and Irishman, if you couldn’t guess by the name, and former proprietor of Hanoi’s own Blue Dolphin pub (or pig fish blue, translated into Vietnamese), an Old Quarter establishment much frequented by local expats, and where I spent many a night during my first year in Hanoi. We hadn’t seen one another in ages, not since my drinking days had ended, after my money went dry. In need of some catching up, Finn treated me to night out, which began and ended with our hitting a string of bia hoi joints, widely dispersed across sprawling Hanoi, where we downed glasses of fresh beer and shots of death infused rice wine as we went. A viper drowned to death and pickled in alcohol was the perfect choice for a man who’d been drowned to death and pickled in life by a viper. So, after a few drinks, with thoughts of the woman responsible for sealing my doom rising up from my subconscious like so many awakened serpents poised to strike, I concentrated on drowning those thoughts by choosing mostly shots infused with dead venomous reptiles. As Finn and I, motorbike to foot, foot to motorbike, moved and wobbled our way across the city, from one drinking establishment to another, I steadily drank my way through the suborder serpentes, as preserved in clear glass jars with lids and spigots. To Katherine’s dishonor, I raised and downed shots of denatured life in liquor, slamming the empty shot glasses back down on the table with a crack, the kind of crack that only shot glass drained and slammed down on a table with an excess of emotion, in this case, odium, can make.
By the end of the night, after snaking our way in and out of bia hoi joints from one end of the city to the other, the empty beer and shot glasses had mounted so high that, had I not been so polluted, I might have used them all to climb my way out of hell and up into heaven. There was a miracle, however, and that was that I could still walk. On the way home, with Finn at the wheel of his Honda Dream Machine II motorbike, me hanging off the back, as we were flying down that wide Hanoi boulevard known as Văn Cao, I leaned for a moment outside of Finn’s slipstream, in an attempt to shout some drunken inanity into his ear, and that was when the wind, perhaps not liking the drunken inanity I shouted, slapped my brand new prescription eyeglasses right off of my face. Well, obviously it was my fault, not the wind’s, but, after you’ve been slapped around by life for seven inexorable years, anthropomorphizing comes easily.
We doubled back on Văn Cao, at this desolate hour, devoid of traffic, and retraced the boulevard for my lost eyeglasses, but the street was too dark, we were to blind with drink, and without wearing my eyeglasses I wasn’t going to be able to find a lost pair of eyeglasses lying out in the middle of an intermittently lit blacktop road in the wee hours, even with the aid of the light of the full moon. The futility of it all, and by that thought, at the time, I meant everything that happened to me, my losing my eyeglasses least of all. my lost eyeglasses least of all. Finn and I found ourselves standing in front of canopied bus stop Văn Cao, under an amber streetlight. “Sorry, man,” Finn said.
But there couldn’t have been a worse time in my life for me to have lost a new pair of cheap eyeglasses that were inordinately expensive for me, not with my mind poisoned by the death-infused reptile alcohol, and the inebriated notion (though not incorrect) that since my American crucifixion, I’d become a revenant, still bearing my cross of injustice, and that the hopes I had of seeing myself one day resurrected were quickly on the wane. Being American, it would have been easy for me to have let everything that happened to me over the past seven years, right down to this very moment, snap me like a twig, because what America does to her own can often produce just such an effect. I think if I had bee in America, I probably would have gone postal. But I wasn’t in America, I was standing in front of an amber lit canopied bus stop on Văn Cao.
“I’m leaving, I said.
“What, where you going?”
“Anyplace, so long as I leave the world of lies behind.”
“What?”
So with the lyrics of Nine Inch Nail’s “Somewhat Damaged” echoing in my head, I pulled off my shoes, shed my shirt, shucked my pants and underwear and lay down in the dirt in the fetal position before the lighted bus stop. I just wanted to die in peace; let the jaws of the red earth of Vietnam open up and swallow me down whole. I was already in hell, so I had no fear of where I might be taken.
Naturally, Finn must have thought I’d lost my fucking mind. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve been judged mentally ill. In fact, in its way, it was just such judgments that had contributed to the sudden meltdown of my core reactor, helped along, of course, by the essence of death now infused into my bloodstream and brain. It was the suffering Katherine and my country had caused me that just made me want to go away. But I hadn’t lost my mind. It was only a mere tantrum, thrown against life. But life was indifferent, I could have laid in the dirt until I turned blue in the face. Life did not give a shit if I lived or died. And I knew it. But live or die? It was my choice. And I suppose I’d already made it, hence my need for throwing a tantrum, even if it was ridiculous. Which made my act only that much more childish, but it was just something I needed to do. My version of primal scream therapy, I guess. Because if I resorted to self-murder, which I’d given thought to on more than one occasion, I knew intuitively it would only end with me finding myself back again in the same situation, in another life, and having to do it all over again. Besides, it would only be giving another victory to Katherine; and, considering the way in which her life seemed to work the opposite of mine, she would probably still get to collect on whatever life insurance polices she had out on me, despite the fact that I had offed myself.
Yes, suicide was out, but I was permitted a bit of flopping around naked in the dirt as part of my protest against the inscrutability of my persecution, even if it was ineffectual. The lost eyeglasses had nothing to do with it. It was just a tipping point, a fuse blown on a surge, but no fire, no damage. And, after everything I’d gone through over the past seven years, I had to count myself lucky that in everything Katherine and America had made me suffer over all these years that I had only been reduced to stripping off my clothing and falling down in the dirt, in a moment of drunken stupidity. In fact, as it would turn out, my little tantrum was timed perfectly, because the blow that would come my way the next day, had I not gotten this out of my system, might have sent me running into a spontaneous swan dive off the balcony of my room, and I’ve spent many an evening on this balcony perched atop the air con unit like a gargoyle, peering down on the street below, or up at the moon and stars and planets in the night sky–Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and, my ruling planet, Saturn. And, as I write, I’m still frightened by what I might have to face in two weeks. We’ve all bravely said at one time or another, I was born alone, I have to die alone. But how many of us have ever tasted our bravery facing destitution alone? Death seemed a less frightening prospect; suicide wasn’t an option, unless, like a Cathar, I performed the endura. Then again, being destitute, I wouldn’t have to worry about ritualistically starving myself to death, it would be taken care of for me.
In any case, Finn, who knew enough about my personal story, and not without sympathy for my plight, after uttering several permutations of “Come on, man, get up before the cops show up,” eventually convinced me to act like a phoenix and rise from my mock death in the dirt. As I drunkenly dressed, Finn reassured me that no matter how bad things became, given enough time, the dirt would be coming around for us someday anyway; death being the only guarantee we do get in life. An easy thing for one who hadn’t experienced death in life to say, but he was right. I also knew I had absolutely nothing to fear, I’d been through so many horrible things already, not imagining that things were about to get worse, possibly the worst things can get, short of death. Which reminds me of something one of my literary heroes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once said: “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.” Whether I wanted it or not, I was soon going to be given the chance to know what absolute freedom really feels like.
If I cursed life the night before, I cursed my hangover even more when I awoke the next morning. Aside from the from the venom and bile taste that lived like death in my mouth, I had on my mind a story I first read in my earliest school days, one that had made a lasting impression on me. It was the story of John Henry, that steel-driving man. And while my thinking about the story probably did in part have something to do with the feeling that John Henry was driving steel bolts, dipped in snake venom, into my hungover head, the real reason I was thinking about the story was because ole John Henry, when he pitted himself against a machine in a steel-driving contest, refused to allow himself to be made obsolete, refused to give up, refused to be beat – and he won! That he died soon after his victory is is another matter. Nonetheless, if ever there was a moment I needed to be inspired not allow myself to be beat, to become obsolete, it was on this day, after I read the email I received from Katherine.
#
I came to Hanoi to start a new life. Instead, after nearly four years, I found myself living in near poverty. Now, in two weeks, I will have to give up the room I’ve been renting for the past eighteen months, across from the Bia Hanoi brewery, in Hanoi’s Dong Da district. I can’t pay for it any more, since I’m nearly out of money – permanently. I have no job; and since I have no degree, I doubt I’ll be able to find any work. For several reasons, the novel which I was supposed to write, and which was supposed to bring me money before the money I had ran out, never got written. There is nobody whom I can ask for help, nobody from whom I can borrow, either here or in America – except for my wife, Katherine. Finn would help me if he could, but he has children to feed and troubles enough of his own (in any case, too embarrassed by my situation, I didn’t mention my problem to him). Even if I could afford a plane ticket back to the US, the homelessness I’d be facing in America would be the same as stand to face here, except, sadly, Americans would let me starve to death long before a Vietnamese, who know the value of life’s necessities in a way most Americans will never know, or care to know. I no longer have any surviving family in America (except for my son, Mark, who just turned eight). It seems there is no place left for me in this world of lies anymore.
Ha, my girlfriend, makes $250 a month, about average for a Vietnamese with a university degree. She says we can get a “Vietnamese style” room, which is just that, a room, no furniture, no fridge, no air-con, no kitchen, no hot water, and the bathroom is outside. She says she can maybe get a second part-time job. This might bring us another $100 a month. The idea being that I keep writing, since that is what I came here to do, publish or perish for real. There are no other choices, but I don’t see how writing is going to help me now. Though writing is exactly what I plan to do.
The novel I had intended to write was supposed to be my first step along the path to creating a new life for myself. I didn’t have any high expectations. I only hoped to earn enough money to live modestly and continue to write. I did, however, have this strange notion that becoming a published writer would give me a voice, and the credibility to go along with it, since I had neither in America, as it turns out. Had I, maybe I could have avoided being persecuted as a result of lies, ignorance and indifference. Katherine’s lies, America’s ignorance and indifference. In the words of Arthur Strindberg, another one of my literary heroes (and an aspie, if it hasn’t yet been pointed out!) said, “This agrees with what every thinking man [and woman] observes, that lying and deceit are universal. The whole of life—politics, society, marriage, the family—is counterfeit. Views which universally prevail are based upon false history; scientific theories are founded on error; the truth of to-day is discovered to be a lie to-morrow; the hero turns out to be a coward, the martyr a hypocrite.” I hoped as a writer I’d get a chance to take on the causes that led to the many injustices I suffered, and for my ability, since my persecution, to see this world in the same way Strindberg saw it – accurately. It is a world of lies. However, I no longer see this as a possibility. If I had money, I would have time. I have neither.
I have two weeks left in this room, where I now sit, Buddha-style in a blue plastic folding chair, writing. (And listening to The Fragile. “Where Is Everybody?” Wondering to myself: where the fuck were you America, when I needed help? When I needed an intelligent, understanding ear to hear the truth that I was speaking between all the lies? Answer: no-fucking-where.) I’ve decided to use this guaranteed remaining time to tell my story, since, two weeks from now, I don’t know what the fuck will become of me. It seems I will never get the chance to write my novel, as I’d hoped. I’ve never before written a shorty story, either. In fact, I haven’t written anything, at least nothing I’ve ever finished. None the less, even if I could get a story published now, (Which would mean what? Three, six, twelve months from now I might receive $500? I can’t even pay the fees most magazines want me to pay them to read my work! I never cease to meet with absurdity in my life.), I don’t see how it will do anything help me in my present situation. Which is why I haven’t mentioned this fact to Ha. Perhaps, when I feel I’ve become to much of a burden on her, I’ll quietly walk out, disappear, embark on my endura in Vietnam. The reason why I want to get my story published is because I’m writing my story for my son, I want it to be part of the public record. When he goes looking for the truth, he will find it. Katherine will hide it from it, is actively seeking to hide it.
I ran into some serious financial trouble a few months back and never recovered. I couldn’t escape the prison my life had become, caged in by increasing poverty. I did the only thing I could do: I asked Katherine to help me. I asked her to send me a few hundred extra bucks so that I could cover my visa renewal and other expenses, all of which come on top of the $600 I owed my landlady for my bimonthly rent. Instead, Katherine sent me $600. Then she let go of her bomb (shock and awe!), telling me that this was the last time she was ever going to send me money ever again! The money she sent – as she knows – will cover only my rent, not my food, not my visa renewal, nothing. Boom!
My only choice is to leave my apartment a month early – in two weeks, and keep $300. I’ll have to use this to pay my visa renewal and cover my outstanding bills. Oh yeah, and eat too. No problem, I only eat once a day now, anyway. Even if I was prepared to break the law, say fuck it, overstay my visa, meaning keep the $170, instead of paying the renewal fee, I can’t. Not unless I don’t about getting my passport back, since I already sent it out for the visa stamp. A lot of fucking good an American passport is going to do me. A lot a good being an American man did me, for that matter.
Katherine knows the consequences I face now, because I told her. She knows that cutting me off completely, without warning, in the way she just did will only ensure that I come to a bad end. If you consciously choose to leave a person in a foreign country with no money, knowing for a fact they have no other source of money, no job, and when you know yourself that you can afford to send the money, you have have passed a death sentence on that person. Katherine had already done some horrible things to me, I mean really horrible shit. I just never expected that she would be willing to go this far. Imagine, leaving me for fucking dead in foreign country. I shared eighteen years of my fucking life with this woman; I gave her a child, after she couldn’t conceive a child herself. This is what she does to me. The truth dies with me, that’s her motive. “Happy?”
That I’ve been dependent on the $600~$800 Katherine has been sending me for the past eighteen months is true. But it wasn’t coming out of her Fendi handbag, the one Koller, White & Ritche (KWR) fills yearly with 500K, her earnings, before bonus, as a KWR partner. When I asked her a few days ago for the extra money I needed, I explained my situation. Six months ago, after she sent me an email, asking me to write Mark, I (stupidly) told her how my life in Hanoi had been going, about my setbacks, my inability to ever catch a break. She knows everything. As do I. Which makes her choice a sinister one.
Katherine knew before I had left America that my brother had been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. I told her six months ago that my brother had since passed away. I told her my father died less than a year later, also from cancer, though his cancer was caused by smoking for fifty years. (My mother died fifteen years ago, also from colon cancer. I will probably die of it too; and don’t think Katherine isn’t aware of this, either. She was there when I got tested after the death of my mother and the doctors found that I had polyps. Like I said, sinister!) I even told her that the two Apple computers I’d brought with me from America had both been bricked by a remote-attack, that my USB flash driver was also hit with a remote-wipe; I told her I had no reason no to believe that these attacks were related to the phone and computer surveillance I uncovered seven years ago; and, considering Snowden’s revelations, it pretty much confirms who it is that has behind our surveillance all of these years. Though it can’t be proved, nor will their intentions ever be known. Their bullies, that is intention enough.
I told her that my novel and all my data (everything I owned digitally, including my pictures and videos of Mark) went to the grave with the two bricked computers (firmware fried) and the wiped flash drive. Assholes! I also told her that since my novel was gone – nearly eight years of my life invested in it – it would take years to start over. I didn’t have years. I had to write something quickly, try to get it published, in the hope that could finally be able to survive on my own – since she never offered me a chance for closure, to get back on my feet. But why would she, when she was out to destroy me? My own fault, for not being willing to except what was always obvious. I just couldn’t imagine a person could become so ice cold. I reminded her that my writing was all that I had left. I didn’t care about money, only about becoming a writer. I told her it would probably take me six months, maybe a year to write a new book. The truth was I had no idea how long it would take me to write a novel, or anything else, since I’d never before finished anything I had started to write. And this all assumed I could write. I also had no idea what I was going to write about, now that my novel was lost. Though, I did find myself thinking more and more about the Victorian novelist, Edward Bulwar-Lytton, for he suggested to me a way in which to use the material from my own life in a novel. I didn’t need to remind Katherine that she’d taken everything from me. She knew it better than me, because she drew up the plan on how to do it and executed it – successfully.
As it was, when she agreed to sell my Jeep for me, she was supposed to send me the money in a lump sum. Instead she parceled it out – $600~800. I never had enough money at any one time to buy a plane ticket home, assuming it was an option. Do you think she didn’t realize this? She also had other reasons for doing this way, which I only now understand. In my email, I was going to tell her to listen to the song “Where I’m Going” by Down, if she was curious to know where it was I was headed, and why it would be that I got there. But in her choice to leave me for dead, it was obvious she didn’t really give a fuck what happened to me. Well, she did care what happened to me, so long as I turned up KIA or MIA. Either would do. When I sent her the email six months ago, along with letter for Mark, after she asked me to write him, she never bothered to reply, not ever for Mark. I was puzzled. Why would she ask me to write and tell him how things were going, and then not respond? Well, when I sent her the recent email, asking for help, she did respond. She didn’t mention the email from six months ago, or why she didn’t respond. But she didn’t need to, her most recent email made everything perfectly clear to me.
#
When a man, a father, reveals to anyone that he doesn’t have contact with his child, that he lost his son, the immediate assumption is that this guy must have done something really wrong, fucked up big time, as a husband, as a father – as a man (because he was a man?), and he probably deserved losing his kid, probably deserved everything that happened to him, that he probably got his ass handed to him in a divorce, deserving everything he got, too! In my case, the situation didn’t result from a divorce, since there was no divorce, the situation being far more complex – that is, far more fucked up – than something like a mere divorce. Divorce is what other people go through, not me, not in this life, not in my seven years of hell. And, yes, I did do something wrong; very wrong. I gave Katherine a child, after Nature, or perhaps just Nature’s clock, told her she couldn’t have one.
It had been Katherine’s idea to user donor eggs, once all the options were exhausted, and it was certain that she wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant herself. The use of an egg donor isn’t the issue though, for had I been married to anyone else but Katherine, gone through all of the same issues with any other woman – I mean, knowing what I now know about Katherine – everything would have turned out fine, even if it did later come to the point of divorce, too. But I was not with somebody else, I was with Katherine, and it didn’t turn out alright, because Katherine had her own motives, her own designs, her own plans. It was my fault for not recognizing what her intentions were before I agreed to it. I’d let the more than a decade we’d been together before she decided she wanted to have a child to deceive my better judgment. I thought all of the years we’d shared together meant that we had between us an unbreakable bond, that because our marriage was tried and true, it meant that we would make even better parents than a couple that had only been together a short time. We weathered so many storms, we came up together, we knew all there was to know about one another. When a child came, we would be on top of it, because we knew were we’d come from and where we wanted to go, and what we wanted for our child.
Well, these years did matter, but they mattered only to me. Not true: our years together mattered to Katherine, but only so long as fulfilled the needs of her narcissistic supply. Sadly, and obviously, I only realize this now. I’m not sure when Katherine had decided I no longer fulfilled this disturbing need of hers, but I’m fairly certain that it happened at some point after our return from Europe, but before we made the decision to use and egg donor. That means that at some point during this three year period Katherine had decided she was finished with me, finished with our marriage. She just kept me around to ensure that I gave her a child, which she couldn’t have without me. She was able to keep up this deceit without once betraying how she really felt about me or the the marriage. It was pure deception, how she faked our relationship. To look back on our marriage now, in hindsight, knowing that she had been faking it for as long as she had, knowing also that her faking it predated by years my first suspicions that our marriage was heading for trouble, yet, in knowing all of this, and still not being able pinpoint the moment when the change came over her, and I ceased to be her eidolon, sends shivers down my spine.
That Katherine was absolutely determined to have a child at any price should have warned me to the fact that something wasn’t right. (She even considered for a time adopting a child from Vietnam. How ironic!) The most telling sign was that she’d gone from caring only about her career one moment to wanting only a child in the next, caring nothing about what became of her career. Its easy to see now, but it wasn’t then. I made a serious mistake by agreeing to have a child with Katherine through the donor egg process. And I’m not talking about my son. My son is an angel, as I’ve said. My mistake was in giving a child to someone who had intended from the start to separate son from father. I couldn’t see that I was being deceived.
I love my son dearly. It’s been nearly four years since I’ve last seen or spoken to him. It gets worse: while still in America, I was kept apart from him for nearly fourteen months. I couldn’t even talk to him over the phone. Sure, the family court ordered it. (Family law in America is a damn disgrace. There is a reason why marriage dissolution in America is called the “divorce business.” The “child’s best interest” will forever be a fallacy, so long as this “business model” prevails!) But Katherine wanted to separate son from father, me from Mark. She used the family court to do it. The family court gave her everything she wanted. It failed to meet my son’s “best interests.”
Anyone familiar with the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book Of The Dead), will realize that embryo implantation offers up a new set of considerations pertaining to rebirth in regard to to how a being to be reborn passes from the ground of becoming into existence. I like to believe that my son still chose me as his parent, the circumstances of his birth. That he was adventurous, wanted to try something new, while also knowing that, while he wouldn’t be getting a perfect person for a father, he would be getting a good person for a parent, one who was less enslaved by this world than others, one who wouldn’t fill his head with all of this world’s lies and bullshit. I like to think that he made his choice and, unable to see what was coming, him and I both, his choice was taken away from him. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Katherine, by setting out with intention to forcibly separate son from father, and permanently, interfered with his karma and my own, in some heretofore unprecedented way, the circumstances of his birth taken into consideration. I think of it like the person who travels back in time and changes the past only to end up altering the future. It isn’t yet possible, if ever. But it seems Katherine, on the other hand, discovered a way to create a rift in the karma stream. Well, perhaps this is just one more fanciful explanation among the thousands I’ve turned around in my head, all in a futile search for something that would explain to me all the improbable, inscrutable situations I suffered over these past seven years.
In my case, it always seemed to be that in every situation I found myself embroiled in, just before the most likely, most probable outcome was about to come true, something would step in at the last moment and say: no, no, no. It can’t be that way. This time it needs to go like this…. And wham! Against all reason and probability the situation would suddenly work against me, in ways that always seemed to defy reality. The situations, the outcomes, they were always absurd or paradoxical, always cruel ironies, often personal ones. Take for example the way in which my experience in childhood mirrors my fatherhood! Which is why I also considered the possibility of karmic punishment as as reason, though I haven’t done anything in this life to deserve the kind of persecution I’ve suffered; no albatross did I slay (that I’m aware of). However, I found I’d written in my notebook the following quote Solzhenitsyn: “You can live being sure you have never sinned, sure of your goodness, but then – bang! – something will happen in your life and you will begin to think: oh, my God! I’m to blame before this man and before that… How on earth have I lived without knowing I was a sinner, though not being some profligate. And you understand you have lived through a chain of sins, and you have to repent.” Indeed. I can’t say with absolute certainty that I either believe or disbelieve in the kinds of things I’ve speculated on, but they are among the many ideas I’ve explored in my search for answers, something that will explain the unpleasant situations and circumstances that have befallen me like a fire-bombing.
As I said, I made a mistake by giving Katherine a child. This is not the same thing as saying my son was a mistake or a regret, for neither is true. I just failed to recognize deception standing at the the threshold of this life. This is a world of lies, it took me seven painful years to learn. How could I have been so blind for so long? “The Thin Ice,” indeed. Cold comfort though it may be, I often think that with or without Katherine, he still would have become my son. Before leaving behind my barren metaphysical speculations, I’ll say this: If one considers that old parental admonishment, oft uttered to ungrateful children: “If it hadn’t been for your mother (hardly have I ever heard “father” used in this context), you wouldn’t be here.” To which, if the child is old enough, we hear in reply: “well, I didn’t ask to be here!” But given the circumstances of my son’s birth…in Katherine’s case it is true – technically. In Mark’s case, it doesn’t necessarily hold true. Not if one considers that I very well could have met the young Polish college student who donated the egg that helped create the embryo that became my son, and, as a result of our meeting, for something to have developed between us romantically, since she was in the US and living in Detroit at the same time as me, as well as when my seaman was used to fertilize her egg, thus creating the embryo that would become my son. Improbable? Sure. But everything that happened to me over the past seven years has defied reason and probability. If anything would have made it improbable, it would have been the fact that I, unlike Katherine, remained faithful during our many years together. But Katherine’s infidelities, including the affair she was having at the time all of my troubles began, is another story.
#
Katherine was forty-one when she suddenly decided she wanted to have a child. It came without warning. She was still forty-three when she was told by the doctors that the odds were against her ever having one. It devastated her, not only because she had to come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t fulfill the role she believed was expected and obliged of women ( this, however, being a complete reversal of her previously held belief that women shouldn’t feel obliged to have children just because they can), but also because she also had to come to terms with the many critical self-judgments she leveled at herself as a result of her infertility, which included the belief that she was somehow inferior to other women, or worse, that her inability to conceive meant that she was defective, as woman, as a person. I did my best to dissuade her thinking in such terms. For a time she also believed that her not being able to get pregnant had something to do with the abortion she’d had over a decade earlier.
She also became obsessed, futile as it was, with trying to determine the precise point in her career when she had crossed that line from fertility into infertility. In other words, what was she doing at the moment motherhood had been removed from her reach? And even if she could have determined the precise moment, it wouldn’t have changed her situation. Besides, though she would later deny it, when she waved her thirties goodbye, her career was still foremost in her mind; the thought of having children something she rarely mentioned. It was only later, once she became aware of her infertility, that she sought to revise her own history, making herself, for a time, into into an infertility martyr, as if she’d been struggling against the odds for years to have a child, which had never been true. Yet it was only two years later, at forty-two, after Katherine unexpectedly started having difficulties at work that she decided to abandon her career aspirations for want of a child.
#
Katherine had always been secretive and enigmatic in everything she did and said, but only in hindsight does it become glaringly obvious for met to see. When she revealed to me that she was having problems at work, which came just ahead of her talk about having a child, it came at a time when it seemed she could do no wrong in her career. She didn’t say much about what the problem was, only that she wasn’t getting on with Tony Asgard, the newly appointed managing partner in charge of Katherine’s group at KWR at the time. As I see it now, the problem was a bit more complicated than Katherine’s cryptic complaints suggested. At the time, Katherine, had a close relationship with Roger Twinnings, who was the outgoing managing partner that Asgard replaced at KWR. Just how close this relationship between Katherine and Roger had actually been I’ll never know. There were a few occasions where I sensed that things between them might have been closer than I would have preferred, which caused a bit of tension between Katherine and I, and mostly had to do with the inordinate amount of time it sometimes seemed they spent together, their both always flying out on the same flights for business trips, always dinning together, and, on a occasions, Katherine’s mentioning the name the name “Roger” too many times on any given day. But Katherine guarded her secrets like the sea. My attempts at successfully excavating the scattered wreck of our long sunken marriage, unproductive.
Katherine had known Roger Twinnings even before KWR sent her to Luxembourg. Roger may even have been the one who pulled the necessary strings at KWR to get Katherine her transfer to Europe, after I’d suggested the idea to her. In the years since, they worked together frequently on many of the same engagements, since they shared similar industry experience in banking and fiance. In 2003 Roger had been chosen to head up Katherine’s group, at KWR’s head office in Detroit. This meant that, as a partner, Katherine reported directly to Roger. He was the one responsible for overseeing her work and performance, her client assignments, and signed off on her proposals and work papers. This relationship made life at KWR easier for Katherine, and was a nice stroke of luck, since she’d been assigned to the Detroit office the same year as Roger’s promotion, which followed our return from Europe. With Roger at the helm, it meant that many of KWR’s most prestigious clients came Katherine’s way, assigned to her by Roger. In some cases, from what I gather, ahead of partners that may have been better qualified than Katherine, at least in regard to who would take the lead role on some the larger projects. This, of course, garnered Katherine a lot of resentment from some of the other partners in the office. This much she told me, though she left out the part about how her relationship with Roger played into all of it.
Once Asgard replaced Roger as the new managing partner, however, things at KWR changed quickly for all of the partners, and Katherine began encountering problems at work. She was having difficulties in meeting her newly assigned performance targets, she also had trouble keeping her projects on schedule, something she’d always seemed to struggle with throughout her career. She was also having difficulties meeting the higher sales numbers that Asgard began demanding from all of his partners, in which case everyone seemed to be struggling with, assuming Katherine was being on the level in what she told me. Because of the sudden drop in revenue that Katherine was bringing in, it resulted in some of her more prestigious clients being taken away and being assigned to clients she found less interesting. She had become, I think, addicted to the glamour that came with working for the bigger named clients, and she found the clients beneath this level “boring.”
She also no longer had Roger to shield her in the ways she’d grown accustomed to, which left her open now to complaints and criticisms from those partners who’d long held grudges against her. As work became increasingly more difficult, the pressure increasing, she began to see herself as less of the superstar she’d once imagined herself to be. And, as she often lamented, work was no longer as fun as it used to be. Little problems became big problems. The setbacks began to mount, and she couldn’t – or no longer wanted to – live up to what was demanded and expected of her. When her career backslide began at forty-three, Katherine, at some point, decided that she no longer wanted to play the part of the career superwoman anymore. Though she remained at KWR. She also began nursing ideas of being a stay-at-home-mom now, though she kept this secret desire to herself for several more years. It would explain why, after Mark was born, she’d come to secretly resent me, because I occupied the place she was herself to be in. Something she only let slip to me in our very last days.
#
As I’ve mentioned, Katherine had it in her mind that the abortion she’d had over a decade earlier had something to do with her inability to get pregnant, even though her doctor had assured her otherwise. If was only a few weeks after we first met in 1992 that Katherine told me she was pregnant. I was a tender twenty-one (I phrase it that way only to emphasize my naivete at the time, for having handed over the best years of my life to a woman who would only seek to destroy me, after I’d invested all of my best years into our relationship) she twenty-six. After she told me she was pregnant, she made it clear straightaway that keeping the child wasn’t an option. She had her career to think about. I didn’t insist she not go through with it, though, the idea certainly made me uncomfortable, for I’d never been faced with a decision of that magnitude before, and the choice wasn’t mine to make. Had I been the one pregnant, I don’t think I’d have been willing or able to go through with and abortion. If she’d said to me that wanted to keep the child, I have no doubt I would have accepted responsibility for fathering it. But this was never an option, not even for a moment. I asked her if she was sure she was making the right decision – she was. Anyway, I know now that there was nothing I could have said or done that would have changed her mind. Her career came first, she came first. How I felt then (I know now) meant nothing to her.
I do sometimes wonder if the child she’d aborted had really been mine, not without good reason, knowing Katherine as I do, now. I had my doubts even then, especially after I found out that she has still been secretly seeing her ex-boyfriend after she met me, though she’d gone to great lengths to lead me to think otherwise. There was also another guy she’d been dating from work, just prior to her meeting me, and who she was actively working with after we met, even traveling with him frequently down to Miami, for a project she was assigned to, and often away on these trips for a week or two at a time. Yes, the business trips, which would only increase a she began to rise in her career – the fancy dinners, the glitzy functions, the after work drinks in hotel lobby bars, the hotel rooms and suites, and the late hours, working into the night. It had always been a part of Katherine’s career from the start, and something, from the very beginning, I had to make the choice to either accept or not. I chose to trust her, putting aside any of the jealousies that arouse now and again. The nature of the work sometimes created situations that made me feel uncomfortable, the intimate relationships that formed, since work so often spilled over into into travel, and other social situations that came about as a result, which went beyond what is normally experienced in an average nine to five careers, not easy on the spouse who remains eternally at home while the other travels. In hindsight, given that Katherine had a sinister doppelganger that I never knew existed until it was too late, given all the pain she would come to inflict on me over the past seven years, I was a fool for ever extending my trust to her, a fool for ever wasting my time in a relationship that would only end in my doom. Caveat emptor.
#
When Katherine decided in the summer of 2005 that she wanted to have a child, I was immediately apprehensive. This was because my parents had divorced when I was three. My father, who was a surveyor, decided, I assume, that the jobs and pay were better overseas. He spent a decade working on major construction projects in the Middle East. The consequence: I grew up without my father, and my childhood was permeated always by a sense of sadness and longing because of it. I also resented my father for his decision, for leaving me. Yet he was my father and I loved him more than anything in the world; all the more so because of his absence. The longing I had for my father as a boy would extend into adulthood, even later, after my father was around, because the hole is irreparable, when your heart is torn as a child. In an old journal I had once written: “We’re the American Dream, aren’t we dad? You and me. Nothing to each other but emptiness and regrets.” Katherine, having been with me as long as she had, knew well all the pain I carried with me into my thirties because of my father’s absence from my childhood (cruelty without conscience: she did what she did to my son and me regardless!) It is also a cruel irony that my life as a father turned out to mirror my childhood so accurately: the fatherless boy had become the father to the fatherless boy. The sins of the father exampled in life! Before my mother had died, one of the last things she asked me to do before she died was to talk to my father. I saw him at the funeral, of course, but it was left at that. It wasn’t until after Katherine was pregnant with Mark that I made the decision to finally forgive my father. Had it not been for Mark, I might never have done it, which would have been a terrible mistake. I’m glad I did, for the three of us, before my father had passed away.
Because of the pain I’d experienced as a child, the loneliness, the sadness, the resentment, the disappointment, the anger (towards my mother as well as my father) – the thought of bringing a child into the world troubled me, though I adored children, and, being a kind of puer aeternus, children always liked me. At the time, pondering the idea of having a child, I reasoned that nothing was certain, nothing guaranteed, that possibility of something happening beyond my control would always be there, and it concerned me. I thought: if Katherine suddenly decided only a few short years after we had a child that she wanted a divorce, even if the divorce were to be amicable (and I imaged that if we did divorce, it would have set the bar for post-divorce parental amicability. How completely, utterly, beyond even just wrong I had been in that freaking stupid assumption!) and, even if mom or dad only lived down the street, after all was said and done in the courtroom, that our child would still have to struggle by degrees with the same negative emotions I’d once experienced as a child. Which is why, when I finally agreed to have a child with Katherine, though still with some reluctance, I made her promise me (!) that we would never do anything to jeopardize our child’s happiness, never put our child through what I had gone through. Naturally, Katherine agreed. She not only agreed, she praised the fuck out of me, telling me how, because of my childhood experience, I would make the greatest father a child could ever hope for. And, yet again, I allowed all of the years we’d been together lead me to making assumptions I never should have made – because we’d traveled so far together, hand in hand, we were going to make wonderful parents. Instead, I should have viewed the marriage as a ship that had been lucky to have lasted out at sea as long as it did, weathering all of those storms without ever springing any leaks, which only suggested that it was only a matter of time before the ship’s luck ran out. How could I have known that what would actually happen was that my shipmate, too long out of sight of land, baking beneath the blistering sun, would go mad, blow a fucking hole in the bottom of the boat and and and blame it all on me? Right, I couldn’t have.
#
By the time Katherine and I met in the summer of 1992, I’d been in several relationship already. Naturally, at twenty-one, I thought I knew everything there was to know about everything – myself, women, relationships, love, life. Truth was – surprise! – I didn’t know shit about anything. I’d always prided myself on being good judge of character, and I am. Katherine, however, was the exception. When I’d found out about all the men Katherine had slept with, I didn’t think it such a big deal at the time. I reasoned that she’d be less likely to cheat, since she’d already had all her fun, satisfied her curiosities. She even had a thing for older man – bearded man, fatherly, protective, bearish men, something she found irresistibly seductive. Which made me wonder why she was with me, five years her junior, and not with some older dude? When she told me about some of the men she’d been with I should have have put this knowledge to use, should have run, far away.
She told me about the professor, when she was seventeen, from the Catholic university she attended (she’d graduated early from Catholic high school), who had taught her all about Teilhard de Chardin, among things of a non-Catholic nature. There was the coke dealer who would swear to her that he hadn’t been in the bathroom sampling his own merchandise, but she could always tell if he was lying to her by a kiss test. He always numbed her lips. There was the guy who claimed to be undercover DEA agent. She wasn’t sure she believed him, but they did do it in the back of a van, parked outside of her best friend’s house, which just so happened to be across the street from her former coke dealer boyfriend. (I’m not making this up!) Then, during one of her first ever business trips, on a layover, she met a jockey (the kind that ride horses) in a lounge, near JFK airport, when JFK airport still had lounges near it. I pictured lounge-orange bar stools, banana daiquiris, Joker Poker, Dean Martin on the jukebox singing “Cha, Cha, Cha, D’Amour,” Pan Am flying Sinatra to the moon, Katherine and the jockey at the bar, her coke dealer boyfriend in the bathroom, the fake DEA agent outside in a van, and – probably because I grew up in the Five Towns, Long Island – the severed head of a Thoroughbred in an airport motel bed. Despite it all I stayed with her. “She’s Evil But She’s Mine” marked the times; though I wish I could say it was a song by the A Flock Of Seagulls, and I followed its lead. You know the song I mean.
#
In 2006, we’d already reached the egg donor recipient process. We’d been through all the fertility treatments, from infertility drugs to IVF procedures; Katherine had also been needled and cupped by every acupuncturist in the State of Michigan. (What I wouldn’t give today to revisit that time for a chance to inject a couple dozen vials of Repronex® and Follistim® into Katherine’s ass with a 21 gauge, 1 1/2 inch, intramuscular needle – forget the ice pack!) Katherine’s initial inability to get pregnant, followed by the disappointments of the the infertility treatments, including a failed pregnancy during her last IVF cycle, were all unpleasant realities that Katherine had no other choice but to accept. But by the time we’d arrived at our final option, using donor eggs, Katherine had relegated her infertility issues to the past; she never mentioned it again. She handled the the donor selection process better than I’d expected, for it certainly mustn’t have been easy on her ego, coming as it did on top of the issues of personal inadequacies she’d gone through as a result of her infertility. The donor selection process ended after we narrowed down our choices to a final candidate: a Polish student studying in the US, in her early twenties, blond hair, pretty, with a genuine enough looking smile and happy demeanor, at least as far the pictures showed, which, aside from the limited details in her biography, was all we had to go on in making our selection. Then again, I knew Katherine for eighteen years. Look what I ended up getting in the end, and in more ways than one.
#
With our choice of donor made, when the time came, I did my business in a cup. (I wish I could still recall the magazines I’d been looking at…. I only know that Katherine was the furthest thing from my mind at the time.) And far from this being disrespectful to my son – I was fully conscious of the choice and the moment that would eventually lead to his birth. There was nothing disrespectful about it. It might even be said that it was more respectful, for nothing about it was accidental. (Katherine, not withstanding.) I chose in that moment to bring a child into this world. My only regret are the things that would happen after Marked turned two.
The embryo produced was healthy, viable. The implantation was a success; the embryo “took.” Katherine was confirmed pregnant. After this she wore and angel charm tucked inside her waistband, on her tummy, in the hope that a baby would soon be there. She asked me if it was going to be a boy or a girl? She said I had good instinct for such things (not exactly her words, but close enough). I didn’t want to be an oracle. In any case, I wasn’t sure either way. Boy or girl, I would be happy either way. The irony is that I was the one who gave her the angel. Was I the one who had faith in angels? Or was it her faith that prompted me to give her an angel on her birthday, with the simple belief that she would appreciate it because she believed in it (or I thought she did) in such things? Whatever the case may have been, she wore the angel in her waistband in hope that the powers that be shine favorably on her — and me. How deceived and deluded by her I had been.
Everything had gone extremely well, Katherine had braved everything well, which was why I was taken aback when she began voicing doubts about whether our child would think that she was the real mother. ”What if the baby thinks I’m not its real mother? What if when the baby grows up it wants to go looking for the real mother? I didn’t tell her: if they did, they did. Why would it be such a big deal? So long as she loved the child, nurtured it, she was the real mother. On the other hand, I could understand why such feelings might arise. Nonetheless, I assured her, “If you love the child, raise it properly, you will always be its mother, there is no reason why it should be otherwise. Our child will love us both, equally. Unfortunately, this belief was mine alone. I should have realized, something wasn’t quite right, especially when her fears didn’t subside. She hid it well, but sometimes she would break out in tears suddenly, fearing that she wasn’t the the “real mother.” It became apparent to me that she wasn’t as emotionally healthy in dealing with the idea of the egg donor process as I first believed. Even after Mark turned two, she broke down crying, repeating the same fear, “What if he doesn’t think I’m his mother?”
#
Then Mark was born. I often wrote my memories of Mark or even made annotations in the books I was reading with Mark in mind, intending to pass theses books on to him someday. Here is one such note, after he was born:
Your mother’s pregnancy went perfectly. I fed her (and you) only fresh vegetable, salmon and chicken during the pregnancy - no garbage food or drinks. Your birth went well with no problems. You were born at the beginning of a summer heat wave. Then we brought you home. We camped out in the living room for months. I was like a daddy penguin, watching over you, staying up through the nights with you, and it was fun.
Another entry:
Tonight before I put you to bed you gave me my first kiss on the cheek, as I’ve been trying to teach you. I’d give you a kiss on the cheek, then I’d give you my cheek and I’d make a kissing noise which you find hysterical. Tonight I gave you a kiss and when I turned my cheek towards you, you gave me a kiss back. I gave you a big hug and then put you down to sleep. You are a smart little boy. You like to laugh a lot. It makes me happy to know that you are such a happy little boy. Your mom and I will always do everything in our power to make sure you stay that way. Goodnight Mr. Buddy. Love, Dad. P.S. You turned 9 months old yesterday ”Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)”
When Mark was first starting to talk:
And, well, before I knew it, I was teaching you to talk… I would lay you down on the bed and run through all the vowel sounds with you: Aaa, Ooo, or Baa, boo, etc. And before long you were doing the same, you picked it up quickly.
Or this one, which always makes me laugh:
Once, we were flying to Connecticut, to visit your aunt. You weren’t even three yet. You asked me where we were flying to. Joking, I said we were flying to the moon. You asked me what we would do once we arrived on the moon. I said we’re going to rent a car. You said: “We can’t rent a car, dad, there’s no roads on the moon.” Ha! You are so smart. How did you know that?
And another, about the sea, Mark’s favorite:
At night, before bed, we always talk about different kinds of animals, but mostly you ask me what kinds of fish and animals live in the sea. I tell you - starfish, dolphins, swordfish, whales, clown fish, crabs, seals, walrus, sharks, anemones, etc. Then you always ask me, and I will never forget your little voice, your cadence, the inflection of your speech, “And what else lives under the sea, dad?”
Towards our final days together, when Mark and I would talk on the phone, which came after he and I had been separated by court order for nearly fourteen months, Mark, in order to delay getting off the phone, after Katherine would came round looking to end our calls, he would ask me, “Dad, how long is day, how long is night?” Taking his cue, not wanting to get off the phone with him either, I would read to him about time from Plato’s Timaeus: “And God lighted a fire in the second orbit from the earth which is called the sun, to give light over the whole heaven, and to teach intelligent beings that knowledge of number which is derived from the revolution of the same. Thus arose day and night, which are the periods of the most intelligent nature; a month is created by the revolution of the moon, a year by that of the sun.” He found this all quite amusing. One day, I thought, anamnesis would come, and he would know all about Pythagorean and Platonic metaphysics, day, night, earth, sky, stars and planets. But now all he wanted was to be reassured of was that he could remain on the phone with father for as long as he wanted. Sadly, sadly….
These first years of Mark’s life I thought were happy times for all three of us. They weren’t, for it turns out that Katherine had only been bidding her time behind a mask of deception. But the time I spent with my son in these first years of his life were some of the best in mine.
#
It was only after Mark turned two that things started getting weird and become progressively worse from there. I don’t know how to explain it all but to say this: she was a world-traveled KWR partner, who earned a half-million a year, drove a brand new BMW 5 Series, lived in a modern contemporary home in the Detroit suburbs, had a beautiful, happy, intelligent, son, who was the mirror image of his father. Except: with her wild streaming hair, the hate smoldering in her eyes, and taking suddenly to wearing a house dress, something I’ve never seen her wear before, she befit the movie image of a possessed woman, in an endarkened Victorian period house, standing in the dark at the top of the stairs. Her image was Bocklin’s Medusa, the thoughts haunting her head, Maupassant’s: “I have no strength, no courage; I’m not my own master, I have no will power; I can’t even make up my own mind, someone makes it up for me and I merely obey.” “She Said She Said” Fire up the gaslights. It may very well have been that she was not her own master, her will not her own, but whatever it had been that manifested itself in her, it had always been there, hidden just beneath the surface, and it chose finally to reveal itself; it manipulated me, it mastered others, and it commanded social institutions, as if they had no will of there own. I wanted to time-lapse this entire eight month period, set in our home, or in leaving our home to stay at hotels, as Katherine suggested, to escape the sometimes devil possessed, haunted house, Double Indemnity aura that hung over everything in our life at the time. Of course, most of it was lit by the flickering flame of a gaslight, or perhaps it was something like the feeling one might conjure up while looking at the flat, atmospheric, images a magic lantern projects, but I'll save it, with the hope that I can someday write about it more completely--with justice, for myself. It was creepy time though, as it was intended to be, at least on one side of the equation; but the government surveillance, on the other side of the equation, which Katherine, as it turns out refusing to believe me (despite the 4th of July), preferring instead to believe that I had lost my mind, probably as a result of her gaslighting, and using this delusion for herself, it made it all easier for her to fool herself into believing that was she was about to do to me was justified. (Simply put the gaslighting merged with madness to make a smoking potion, indeed) The effect was that make-believe crossed paths with stark reality (which does makes sense, if one considered the inexplicable persecution that came down upon my head and hung over my life for seven long years. Gaslighting, madness, government surveillance--and me.) Yet I was the one standing in the middle of all this, seeing both sides, yet not knowing what to make of it all, but trying to be a good sport about, because, while I knew there wasn't anything supernatural going on, there kind of was something supernatural going on, though it had nothing to do with Katherine's game.) Katherine, on the other hand, chose to not take the surveillance seriously, nonetheless, in lighting her many matches, so to speak, she would pretend it was real in order further the cause of her gaslighting. As I say, it was extremely complicated; and it was good thing I never mentioned, until now, anything but the surveillance, otherwise they might have locked me in a padded room and thrown away the key. Between the gaslighting and the surveillance, madness did take hold suddenly--I know, I saw it. I saw the serpent-haired head of Medusa; and luckily I averted my eyes in time. It was one of the strangest, most inexplicable periods in my entire life. The song “Battle Axe” by the Deftones defines my memories of this time; it marked the approach of the dark days soon to befall me.
#
"The Beginning Of The End"
#
For brevity’s sake I’m going to fast forward over the events that took place over the eight month period that followed my July 2009 discovery that Katherine and I were being targeted by phone and computer surveillance by an unknown source and the changes that came over Katherine. It can’t be explained simply! If I manage to survive my present predicament, and my destitution doesn’t bring me to my knees in a bad end, I intend to write in detail about this period. My version of something like Strindberg’s Inferno. Maybe I’ll entitle my novel Gaslight! It would turn out as a windfall for Katherine that I happened to discover the surveillance at the same time as she had laid her own plans. How much the two crisscross I will probably never know. In other words, it was a gaslight that came atop a real issue with surveillance. The problem was not me. I know what I was talking about, what I found. The problem became that the actor forgot were her role ended and where reality began. If it’s any consolation to Katherine (though she deserves no such considerations), nobody in America was prepared to believe that surveillance of the kind I discovered was going on. “NM 156” in our cowardly new world was becoming real. Unfortunately, I was one of the few to have lost my bliss so early. Machines aren’t the only conscienceless things in this world. It wouldn’t take long before I heard the “War Pigs” siren howling. I was after all a kid of the Cold War. I didn’t have that much bliss to lose; and it didn’t require any great leap in logic for me to lose whatever bit of bliss I had remaining.
(And, despite all that I would end up being put through as a result of this discovery of mine, this surveillance still plagues me today. The computer I am now using, which belongs to my girlfriend, is compromised the same as my other computers had been. An American not living in America is suspect American these days, is he not? It angers me greatly to have my privacy invaded in such a way, as an individual and as a writer. But there is nothing I can do about it!)
#
When I first discovered that our life had been invaded by the phone and computer surveillance, I never considered the possibility that it originated with the US government. Why would I? As American citizens, we have rights, we are protected by the our Constitution. And for once, all the make believe I grew up watching on American television and in films got it right when it came to depicting on the screen the fact that the “authorities” needed probable cause and a court orders before they could about invading the lives and privacy of American citizens, whether it be a phone tap or a “bug.” America taught me as a kid growing up that as an American I was entitled to the kinds of rights that the citizens of America’s Cold War enemies were not entitled to. I believed it, took it seriously. So why would I assume that the surveillance I discovered on our phones and computers had come from my own government, especially since our taxes were paid, the only overseas shipments I received contained books and Japanese prints, I was only half Sicilian, I didn’t own a high powered assault rifle with scope, nor did I have any secrets to reveal, except what I desired to express of myself, as a neophyte writer.
I suspected that what I’d uncovered was connected to China or North Korea. This was only after I ruled out that what I’d discovered was far too sophisticated for it to have been the doings of some neighbor’s script kiddie. More specifically, I thought it was coming from one of these two countries because, shortly after I’d discovered that someone had been hacking into our computers, Katherine and I stood by mesmerized one afternoon on July 4th, 2009 and watched as someone took control remotely of my Macbook’s desktop, though the WiFi had been turned of on the computer and I had also yanked the plug out on the WiFi router, once I realized what was taking place, none of which made any difference, since the remote connection remained active. The cursor continued to carryout its ultimate mission, as it purposefully moved deeper down through its menu selections, until it ended up at something to do with AppleScript, which I knew nothing about. I forced shutdown of the computer, because this strange intrusion into our life had given us the creeps.
How long had someone been in control of our computers like this? Had they been listening in on everything we had been saying? Watching us over the computer’s camera? The feeling it gave us wasn’t much different than one would have walking into their home to discover it had been burglarized. You realize that a stranger, or strangers, has just invaded the sanctuary of your home, your most private and intimate possessions are strewn about everywhere, draws and lids and doors left open, after they had rummaged and pilfered everything. Your private life has been invaded, you feel violated, unsafe. Your left with nothing but questions and unsettling feelings. Who did this? What were they looking for? What did they take? Will they return? This was the same as I had felt when I first discovered that someone had hacked our computers, but it only became more real for me when I watched it happening before my eyes - our eyes!
The reason why most people don’t take hacking and surveillance as seriously as they should is because they rarely see it happening to them with their own eyes, which is the only kind of evidence that will ever be convincing enough to alarm them. If they know nothing about computers and technology, seeing evidence of hacking by way of a few lines of code, or a malicious file, or even suspicious or altered computer settings, isn’t going to make much of an impression on them, even if they are told it means that eyes and ears are on them.
People need to see before they believe, this is nowhere more true than when it comes to computer surveillance. If you catch someone peaking through a curtain in your bedroom and rush over to the window in time to see a shadowy figure in your backyard trip over the garbage cans before vaulting over the fence, then you believe; you feel violated; you are alert, on guard. But you will rarely see an intruder when you are being spied on in the same way on your computer. What people fail to realize is that there is no difference between the person peaking through your window and the person hiding behind the desktop of your computer, or on your phone. Except, when it comes to electronic surveillance, that person outside the window is now standing invisible over your shoulder, there night and day - you turned your computer/phone off? Sure about that? - hearing and seeing everything you do, along with recording every click and keystroke of your Internet activity, day after day after day. What did you search on two weeks from yesterday? What did you search on three hours ago? Wouldn’t you be surprised if you were handed a report of all your activity keyworded, cataloged, correlated and finger-printed to you and your unique and identifiable habits and preferences. Your unconscious is spilling out into your computer activity and you aren’t even aware of it. But people have great difficult conceiving of this simple truth. Katherine and I saw it with our own eyes. Someone had invaded our life, using our phones and computers to do it. Though the more intensively I came to pursue the issue the more Katherine would come to disbelieve it, or not care to believe. Though she would use it to her advantage, to advance her agenda to the final conclusion. Thinking me crazy only took the pressure of the truth off of herself, it also helped her in seeing her agenda through to the end with counterfeit justifications.
It wasn’t until two months later, when I chanced upon an Internet article discussing the July 2009 cyber attacks, that I realized that computer hacking I uncovered was more serious than I had at first imagined. This was the point when I realized it wasn’t an individual and mostly likely a country like China or North Korea was behind it, which, when also considering the kind of work Katherine did for KWR, didn’t seem so surprising to me, as I started searching for answers.
According to the article, on July 4th, 7th and 9th of 2009, remotely activated botnets were used to launch denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting high-level government, news media and financial websites in America and South Korea. The number of hijacked computers used in these attacks are said to have ranged from about 50,000 to over 150,000, with the majority of the computers located in Asia. While the attacks only targeted websites (as far as we know, that is), every major branch of the US government had been hit, including the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Treasury Department, Homeland Security and National Security Agency. The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ stock market had also been it, along with the Washington Post, among the websites of other business and organizations. These attacks received only limited media coverage. Not surprising since America had yet to express much interest in issues such as cyber security or the cyber welfare of our citizenry. And, as we only now know, at the time, our own government was engaged in advancing its own mass surveillance agenda, and so had not great desire to make America more aware of something it didn’t much give a shit about. Ignorance is bliss.
According to the US government, North Korea had been responsible for the attacks. But whether these attacks were only intended to be disruptive, a nuisance, without a more significant motive behind the attacks, perhaps something diversionary in nature, it still remains that the US government, caught off guard, got a cyber boot up its cyber ass. In my opinion, and for reasons related to certain events related the my discovery of the surveillance presence in our life, I believe the attacks might have had a specific purpose, a component of the attack being directed towards public infrastructure, for example, a cyber prodding of sorts, aimed specifically at the vulnerabilities that exist in major US power grids. This is only my speculation, and as you will soon learn, nobody gives a shit about anything I have to say. It was also reported that the computers involved in the attacks were programmed to erase themselves, either by hard drive wiping or by having the machines self-destruct. In fact, my Macbook, the one Katherine and I witnessed being taken over on July4th, did self-destruct, less than a week later. Perhaps, because I had been poking around too much, and it had still retained to remote connection to - whomever. The computer’s firmware apparently fired itself. Whether the attacks were limited simply to DDoS against major websites, as reported, or whether there was some other motive more significant behind the attacks, I still view the event as a Pearl Harbor of cyber attacks, one that went completely ignored by the American public.
Despite my self-destructing computer, which, according tot he media reports, suggested the cyber attack operation, or whatever one cares to call it, was over and done with, the computer surveillance that I discovered, in our case, did not end. Instead, the more I delved into the issue (and being no techie, just an aspie with interest peaked), the more I uncovered about what was likely going on, the more extensive and sophisticated I found the surveillance to be. From this point on, no matter what kind of electronic device we purchased (that is, anything that had phone, Internet or other networking capabilities) it became impossible to obtain a secure setup, that is, the root (superuser) account would be stolen out from beneath it before any setup was complete. One was left with administrative control - but not complete, unfettered control at the superuser level. The fact of the matter was that whomever it was behind our surveillance, they were consistently and inscrutably capable of taking control of any computer, phone or electronic device (with networking capability) at will. And this drove my determination to get down to the bottom of the hacking issues, so that I could once and for all drive a red hot needle through the cyclopean eye of our surveillants. I became an Ahab, electronic surveillance became my white whale. However, in the end, it wouldn’t be the white cyber whale that led me to destruction. That honor would go Katherine Malia-Zek, helped along by America’s rampant philistinism.
America’s ignorance and complacency regarding cyber security issues in 2010, particularly when it came to individuals like myself dealing with such issues, became the most decisive factor in why my life would become systematically destroyed. Had American paid more attention to its cyber welfare at the time, had it been better informed, had the July 4th cyber attacks received wider attention in the media, had America not been so predominated by philistinism and indifference in this particular regards, perhaps what happened to me could have been avoided. It was my misfortune to have discovered in 2010 issues nobody in America took seriously or approached intelligently, and were unwilling to give any serious consideration to until it was finally brought to their attention - with shock and dismay - until 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed to the world the the fact that the US government had been engaged in mass electronic spying against US citizens domestically for years. This was too late to help me. The reason why I sit here now in ruins, two weeks away from almost certain destitution, is because nobody believed me in 2010, nobody listened to what I had to say, nobody helped me - nobody fucking cared, about me or computer privacy and surveillance. In other words, years before the world had even heard the name Edward Snowden, my life would be destroyed because I had discovered for myself what he would later reveal - and nobody would fucking believe me. Not believing me would have been just fine. But instead, America persecuted me for it! And, regardless of the role Katherine had to play in all of it, America should have known better.
It wasn’t until Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the existence of ongoing mass domestic spying operations in America that I had no doubts whatsoever that the the US government had been the main actor behind the surveillance I discovered in 2009. And, what Katherine and I witnessed on the afternoon of July 4th 2009, when my computer was taken over remotely before our eyes, because of the likelihood that it was China/North Korea behind it, this only further strengthens the probability that Katherine and I were under US government surveillance, especially if one is familiar with the ways in which it has since been revealed that the spies spy on the spies spying on the spies.
It was only in light of the details Snowden revealed regarding the nature and intention behind the plethora of mass surveillance projects that had been in operation for years - PRISM, Room 641A, Carnivore, Magic Lantern, ECHELON, etc., that I realized myself that the surveillance I’d discovered in 2009 probably went back to 2003, when Katherine and I were living in Frankfurt, Germany (pre- and post- 9/11). And, all things considered, that is, what we know about these programs, and Katherine’s works with KWR, It would hardly be a stretch to assume that the phone and computer surveillance I discovered in 2009 actually goes all the way back to the autumn of 1999, when Katherine and I were preparing to move to Europe. Chapter 58 of the Tao Te Ching: “The government that seems most unwise, oft goodness to the people best supplies; that which is meddling, touching everything, will work but ill, and disappointment bring.”
#
Our move to Europe in 1999 came about as a result of Katherine being told by KWR the year before that she wasn’t partner material, that the most she could expect was to be promoted to director in another year or two, which meant that Katherine’s fast-moving career escalator was about to come to a screeching halt, and long before any ceiling was in sight, let alone a glass one. I suggested to Katherine, if that was going to be the case, and KWR wasn’t going to make her partner, then we should go to Europe instead. If KWR in Europe had a need for someone with her industry experience in banking and finance, she might be able to parlay the couple of years of international experience she gained working in Europe into a second chance at making partner in America, since she would be bringing experience to the table that most of the other partner candidates in the past seemed always to be lacking. I was right; it worked.
We lived in Europe for the next five years - Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany. But these moves did not come without fears for Katherine. Strange as it seems, at least to me, Katherine felt more secure in her work than in her life. I suppose many people cling to their work in the same way that people lost at sea cling to whatever floats, otherwise, in their panic and fear, life drowns them. Katherine, despite her success, was beneath it all a fearful person, especially when it came to moving outside of her comfort zones. This was so pronounced in her that just the idea of her being home without a car in the driveway, available to her at all times, would send her into a panic: “What if something happens and I needed to get somewhere in an emergency?”
Living in a foreign country was certainly something that exceeded the narrow confines of Katherine’s comfort zone and made her particularly uneasy, but she relied on me for her security. (Which only illustrates just how disturbing her decision to leave me for dead in Hanoi really is, from a psychological perspective, given her own general fears in life, which include her own experiences living in foreign countries; instead of do unto others as you would have them do unto you, she turned it into do unto others what you would most fear happening to yourself!) I supported and chaperoned a nervous Katherine all the way through our time Europe. The point is that Europe and the success Katherine achieved in her career because of it, never would have happened had she not been partnered with me. I traded my life for “our life,” and I did my part, fulfilled my end, and helped her in achieving her own success. By the time we returned to the US (KWR Detroit) in the summer of 2003, Katherine had already been a partner for more than a year, since she was promoted while still in Europe, due the opportunities that had come her was as part of her participation on projects involving some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions. You’re welcome Katherine!
To say exactly what Katherine’s work entailed is difficult, since even she had a hard time explaining to people what she did. Her work essentially revolved around information technology (whatever that means!), fraud prevention, computer security, and the like. It’s amazing how similar all of these components of her works seem to suggest something like, say— computer hacking! White hat, black hat, a hat is a fucking hat! Katherine didn’t wear a hat, but many of the people surrounding her did.
On any given day spent with Katherine, I was apt to here several times a day, everyday, including weekends, expressions such as “bring to the table,” “proactive,” “inside the box,” “face time,” “phone tag,” “touch base.” And, ironically, after eighteen years together, in the end, it seems Katherine and I were never “on the same page.” Around the time same time as I’d discovered the electronic surveillance, Katherine told me that she’d had recently acquired the US government as one of her new clients. At first, not even this had let me to suspect that US government had something to do with the new surveillance we’d only just recently welcomed into our family, so sure and proud and confident was I in my country’s integrity, as well as my belief that it upheld the importance of laws and rights and privacy and respect for its citizens. But later, when things began to get strange, when Katherine’s behavior became even more unusual, as if she was involved in something dangerous, this little detail Katherine had given me about her new client, Uncle Sam, only succeed in making me increasingly more alarmed as the months wore, but in relation to Katherine, not as the cause of the surveillance itself.
I assumed, because Katherine’s clients were banks, financial institutions, credit card companies, the government and because she attended many high level meetings which involved the discussion of sensitive business matters, in these areas, discussions about operations, security, planning, in addition to the hundreds, if not thousands, of emails that she received, along with all the voluminous work papers that got traded back and fourth between herself, KWR, the clients, etc., that the surveillance that I discovered might also have links to Russia as well as China, which was more than a reasonable assumption given what Katherine and I had witnessed together on the 4th of July. As things stand today, with the kind of information that has since come out about the US governments involvement in computer surveillance, first, its obvious now that our government would have been right in there alongside China and Russia in its cyber snooping, with each country doubling back to snoop on one another while they were at. I mean, isn’t this how the spy game is played anyway?
#
"In A Dark Place"
#
February 2010, a day that will live in infamy—only for me. A turning point in my life was about to come, one which would change life as I had know it forever. The consequences created for me on this particularly frozen February day, in Connecticut - Greenwich, to be precise, would reach all way from then straight through time right up to this present moment, as I write. It was two days after I’d just driven our family, per Katherine’s demand, delivered, however, in the guise of some pressing need (she had a KWR meeting to attend in the city and didn’t want to fly) from Detroit, all seven hundred plus, snowy, icy miles, to Katherine’s sisters house Connecticut. Katherine wasn’t tied to a desk, she was jet set corporate (not quite, but close enough) and we were the modern, progressive, moneyed family—we could do shit like this on the click of a mouse, and did. By car and plane, it was probably about the fifth time we’d visited her sister in as many months. I hated going to her sister’s house. There had been a many years, too, where Katherine avoided her sister as if she had leprosy; now they were the best of kin, once again. And then, Katherine and Mark and I went out for dinner and drive - Katherine’s suggestion.
After dinner, about thirty or so minutes into our drive, and eight months after my July 2009 surveillance discovery, I would found myself in a Connecticut police station, sitting at an interrogation room table, sometime after early winter nightfall, being given one of two choices: either I go to jail for taking away my wife’s cell phone in the car and refusing to give it back to her, or I agree to go to Bedlam University Medical Center (BUMC) for a voluntary psychological evaluation. If there was any reason why I hadn’t been threatened with a waterboarding, it was simply because they didn’t care to hear anything I had to say.
As I set there, my ultimatum given, confused, terrified, I kept running everything back through my mind: What had just happened? Why are they accusing me of taking Katherine’s phone away? I told the officer, (blurted it out, without taking a breath) she gave it to me so I could call 411 and find a local office for the local Federal authorities, since she refused to call, giving me the phone to do it, though I was driving, in traffic, which is also why I hung up before I even got an address - you can even check the phone bill, probably four seconds, 411.
Worse: Why do they think I refused to give the phone back to her? She didn’t ask me for it! Why didn’t they seem to care when I told them that somebody’s been hacking our computers for the last eight months? The cyber attacks? Katherine’s work at KWR? Aren’t these reasons to be concerned? They didn’t even seem to care when I told them I was concerned about Katherine’s safety. Didn’t it sound strange to them that Katherine kept saying to me that she felt safer at my father’s house? What the hell was that supposed to mean anyway? I didn’t know; she wouldn’t tell me. And what about that argument a couple months back, the time when I went to walk out, had to get away from her for awhile, after she started that stupid argument, about I don’t even know what, and she says to me, “If you leave, you’re gonna get hurt, you’re gonna be sorry?” What the hell did that mean? She didn’t tell me, of course. She leaves me guessing. What am I supposed to do, beat it out of her? How could I not think she was in some kind of trouble, or all of us? How was I supposed to decide anything, if she wouldn’t answer a simple yes or no? Are you in trouble? Are we in trouble? Does it have anything to do with the computers?
As I sat there at the table, across from the officer, I felt like a captured criminal —a criminally insane captured criminal. I felt like an idiot trying to explain to them everything that had happened, because they were making me feel like an idiot by treating me like I was an idiot. There was just too much to tell, too many disjointed details. I was nervous, concerned about Mark, Katherine. Confused about why I was being treated this way. Though my reasoning was sound, I began to babble a bit. I was scared, confused. I knew I had started to sound like I was blathering, because I could here myself blathering. I’m telling the officer about the hacking, the problems with the our phones, about the attacks, about botnets, about how Katherine’s behavior led me to believe that she was in some kind of trouble. Meanwhile, as I’m talking, the officer is looking at me like I was wearing a tinfoil hat, and had just told him that a flying saucer descend from the sky into my backyard and hovered over the pool, while I watched as a lapis lazily-colored alien, wearing a Yankee cap, drinking a diet Coke, and whistling the theme song from A Fist Full Of Dollars, hopped down the ramp of his saucer-shaped craft on his mermaid-like flipper, and gave me the finger, before leaning on a tree (because he had a mermaid-like flipper) and proceeded to take a dump in the middle of my back yard that turned the entire lawn that glowing green color of those wasabi-flavored fish eggs they serve in sushi restaurants - with all of this taking place beneath the light of a full moon. However, the problem (for me) was that I hadn’t said anything remotely close to this. I was talking intelligently, though blathering, and he, for whatever the reason, either wasn’t grasping what I was telling him or didn’t care. To be completely misunderstood by a person who has complete authority and control of your liberty and freedom, and to know that he should be understanding what you are saying to him but instead he is not, is probably one of the most frightening experience there is to go through. What else was I supposed to do? If he wasn’t grasping, or didn’t want to grasp, what I was saying to him, then anything else I might say would only make matters worse—and it did, because I didn’t stop talking, since I didn’t know why I had been brought into an interrogation room like I was some kind of criminal in the first place.
The moment I walked into that damned police station with Mark and Katherine I knew I’d made a really, really bad blunder, especially when the two officers came over, almost as soon as we’d walked through the doors, and immediately led Mark and Katherine back to a room on the other side of the wall of bullet proof glass, while, meantime, I’d only just begun to explain to the duty sergeant why I was there. It was amusing for about five seconds to think that the police thought that I was some kind of psycho criminal or something, which necessitated them separating Mark and Katherine from me; it was laughable. At the moment, the sergeant was listening to what I was telling him and seemed to be taking it seriously. Except, about fifteen minutes later, I suddenly found myself being treated by the police like I was psychotic or something. I was in serious troubling situation, and here it was all taking place in one of the few places one is supposed to go when seeking help because they are in trouble. But now I felt like a Hindu cow lost in Texas, speaking Hindu—because nobody seemed to understand a word I said.
#
About a half hour later, I found myself sitting in the back of a police ambulance, without restraints, thankfully, on my way to Bedlam University Medical Center (BUMC). An EMT, in a dark blue paramilitary style uniform sat beside me; whether we were going to the hospital, or preparing to fast rope out of the back of the ambulance, I couldn’t tell. The EMT asked me something about botnets, what are they? I think. He must have heard me talking to the other officers. But I wasn’t thinking about fucking botnets at the moment. I was thinking: How could this be happening to me? I kept running everything that had happened through my mind. Thinking: too late now; I should have told the officer how, in the car, Katherine kept biting at her lip, as if something was weighing heavily on her mind, something that frightened her. Well, I did tell him about how she kept looking into her side view mirror every few minutes, as if we were being tailed by another car. Everything was fine with her at the restaurant, she didn’t seem concerned about anything. She was just short with me, as if my presence irritated her. “Peter, I’d like to go for a drive after we eat instead of going straight back to Karen’s.” I agreed, I didn’t want to back to Karen’s yet, either. Then next thing I know we’re in the ca, and she’s behaving all weirded out, looking in the mirror, lip biting, acting like she was about to be killed by someone—or we all were.
“Katherine, what is the matter? What’s going on? Does it have something to do with the computers?” She says nothing, biting her lip, looking in the mirror.
Then she says: “I feel safer when we’re at your dad’s house.” (We had seen my father the day before; he lived forty minutes from her sister house. But that was it.)
“What? What are you talking about? Safer from what? That’s it Katherine, I’m going to the FBI. This has gone too far. You won’t tell me anything. Let them figure out what the hell is going on.”
“We should just go to the police.”
“I’m not going to the police, they’re not going to understand or care about what happened on the 4th or any of the other computer issues. Its got to be the Feds, FBI.”
I was only bluffing, at first. I thought it might force Katherine to budge, tell me was really going on. But when I pleaded with her to talk to me, tell me what kind of trouble she was in, she refused to say anything. She just kept looking into the side view mirror. And now she wanted me to go the police, which meant, then, that something was wrong. But I didn’t want to go the police. It had to be the Federal authorities, except the car’s navigation wasn’t coming up with any locations; Katherine wasn’t helping me; it was almost as if she was deliberately trying to make me more harried than I already was; and I was driving too. I was going to pull over, though now I wasn’t sure if I should stop the car or not, just because of the way she’d been acting. Maybe someone really was following us? Maybe she couldn’t say anything, maybe she was being threatened? Mark’s being in the car only made me more nervous, since I had no idea what was going on and I didn’t want to do anything that might endanger him. Instead of pulling over, I tried to make the call myself, since Katherine wouldn’t. It was dark, I was in traffic… Before I’d even asked 411 for a number, I’d hung up.
In the ambulance, nervous as hell, my heart was beating like the idle on ‘68 Shelby Mustang GT500, which wasn't helped by the Adderall I'd taken earlier that day. I was still running over in my mind everything I’d said to the police, everything I’d forgotten to say: I should have told them about the KWR partners that had recently been arrested - financial fraud, insider trading, the KWR lawyer arrested for blackmailing his KWR colleague, who he’d been having an affair with, she as married, demanding she send him nude pictures. I should have told them about the fraud prevention she does for banks, the credit card companies, our five years in Europe - who knows who she might have approached her then? Or the US government? What branch, Treasury? She never said. Maybe I should have told them that Katherine told me before we left for Europe that she said she wanted to work for the NSA? Maybe she did, I wouldn’t know if she did, would I?
I switched tacks: that nagging suspicion I had and couldn’t shake that Katherine had been putting me on all these past months with her strange behavior. But why? She had weirded out a couple times in the past, similar to this night. My first thought had been, with all the sneaking around she often did on the weekends—her happy seminars, those weirdo positive thinking meetings she liked to attend, never telling me about it, but always forgetting to take the free smiley face tote bags with the propaganda pamphlets in them out of her car’s trunk. Be Happy! I thought for a time, because of her sudden changes in behaviors that maybe she’d gotten involved with some cult. I’d read somewhere that it was the kind of seminars she attended that many of these cults use to recruit their victims. Lore all the perpetually unhappy people to a seminar, give ‘em a tote bag, a cup or two of Jones’ brand grape Flavor Aid. Who knew, with Katherine; such a sneaky thing she turned out to be, but only then did I begin to see it. She behaved at times like she was twelve year old girl. And we were kind of living in the middle of cult country; Katherine was always kind of naive and gullible when it came to that kind of crap. How else to explain all of her weird… that droning, pitch-less voice? The blank expressionless behavior, almost like her personality had been deleted? Though she fit the M.O. I never really took the cult thing all that seriously. It was something else. But what?
I knew one thing for certain, something strange was going on with Katherine and she was going to a lot of trouble to keep it from me; yet at the same time she also seemed to want me to know that she was keeping something from me. A mind-fuck, in other words. There was the affair…wanting to both hide and reveal it at the same time, was a classic sign. Her affair was the most likely cause of her strange behavior—that was her cult. A cult of two! They assembled in high-end hotel rooms, worshiped at the alter of infidelity, praised and anointed one another, showered, kissed —departed: until next Wednesday my darling dearest. Looking back, I knew beyond any doubt she was involved with someone, and in a way I didn’t care that much. If we’re born alone, die alone, then we really have the right to fuck whomever we want in this life, no? This was my reasoning. Just… She could have just told me, didn’t need to give me a moniker that made me sound like I was some species of exotic bird—a captive one, for sure, living in an expensive cage. Yeah, I knew she was having the affair; I just didn’t have enough proof to confront her with. Then again, if I confronted her with porn-quality video, money shots and all, she would still deny to my face that it was her in the video. Yeah, but what if there really was such a video? And there was the computer computer surveillance; there was no telling for certain who was behind it. It could have started out as eavesdropping for some financial information, some useful stock market betting information—in advance of everyone else (she sometimes set in on board meetings), and, oops!, check this out, she’s nailing the CFO of $$$$ corporation on the side. Could be good for a double payoff—we have audio, we have a bit of sideways video. Or like the KWR lawyer who got nabbed for demanding the nude pictures; he wanted her to snap them while her hubby was in the shower—or else! She said, fuck you! Went to the FBI instead. He was a lawyer, should have known better. People do amazingly stupid things. By this point in our relationship, I’d begun to see Katherine differently, a side I’d never seen before. Nothing in what I saw suggested that I could rule anything out. Certainly blackmail was a possibility; I’d even read about promiscuity as a trait in certain types of individuals. Anything was possible—and there was still the surveillance.
I didn’t tell the police about the bag we’d recently lost at the airport. It was too difficult to explain, plus they had stopped listening to me anyway. Also, I still didn’t know what to make of it. On a flight back to Detroit from Karen’s house, a couple of months back, Katherine put our checkbook and tax returns in the outside zipper of a checked bag. I didn’t know at the time she had done it. She would never have been so stupid as to do something like that. She’s been traveling the world on business since forever. Anything of importance always went into the carry on, it was standard operating procedure. Except this one time she decided to put the checkbook and tax returns in a checked bag—in the outside unlocked zipper compartment. What had she been thinking? After the flight, by the time we got downstairs to collect our luggage—surprise!—the bag was missing. And even though it had taken us forever to get Mark all packed up to deplane, though most of the other passengers had already gotten off, she insisted we let everyone else go first. That was me; I was the one who always said that; she was the one always in a hurry to get off the plane. This time, the flight had been so aggravating, I just wanted to get quickly, and now she seemed to be stalling. Bag gone! Had we not gone straight from the airport to the bank, the180K that was in our checking account could have disappeared. We closed the old checking account and opened a new one. I should have gone with Katherine the next day, too, when she went to close our saving account and reopen a new one, though we rarely had any money in that account. I was going to go, but I was busy, so she suggested go have myself added another day, Predictably enough, I ended up never going. It didn’t make much of a difference, since we never used the account anyway. Was I being too suspicious, as Katherine suggested? She she just didn’t pay attention; we were already late for the airport, so she just shoved a bunch of stuff in the check-on. (I found myself repeating in my mind at the time “Katherine don’t lose that checkbook” to the tune of “Rikki Don't Lose That Number”) Maybe I was making too much of it? It was just bad luck. By this time, too, I was already getting enough flack from Katherine about my “obsession” over the computer hacking. I was being too suspicious.
The ambulance ride moved in slow motion, while my mind was racing: I must be crazy for having been stupid enough to go the police for help. They treated me like I was a fucking idiot, made me feel paranoid. But they hadn’t gone through the insanity Katherine had put me through over the past eight months. If what I was telling them sounded a bit crazy, it was because the reality was a bit crazy. I wasn’t making this stuff up, wasn’t deluded. Eight months from the time I first discovered the surveillance: between Katherine’s inexplicably strange behavior, the computer issues, the phone calls—hangups, modem tones, fax tones (much later, I checked out some of these phone numbers, since I’d begun jotting them down. Several of the calls came from a fax machine at the Korean-owned cleaners near our house that Katherine used WTF?) — our house alarm going off at all hours (always, or so it appeared in hindsight, soon after returning home from one of our our trips to see Karen; twice we got calls at Karen’s house from the alarm company, telling us the alarm had gone off, the police checked the property, everything appeared secure) and the police getting pissed with us because we were wasting their time with false alarms. My almost getting shot by the police late one night, after the alarm went off, and I went outside to check the basement windows (”Intruder alert: basement window”), holding a wood round stick in my hand. The squad car pulled up the driveway and the officer saw me, the intruder, weapon in hand—since, as the officer told me, my wife had told the dispatcher she saw an intruder outside the house—“You were this close to being shot, I thought you had a shotgun in your hand. Next time, stay in the house until the squad car arrives.” Then there was the night when the telephone transformer explode all the way down by the street, I saw it from up in the loft, it looked like a white phosphorous flower exploding into bloom—I’d been on the computer at the time, trying to figure out who had just made a remote connection to it, dueling with whomever it was, using terminal, though meantime I was getting stripped of all of my admin user privileges by them. And, then, there were all those trips, back and fourth, back and fourth, to Katherine’s sister house—and even having having computer problems there, too. What was it, five—six trips? In eight months.Yeah, so Katherine could go into Manhattan and meet whomever it was she’d been seeing. Client meetings, she said. Right. But no wonder I sounded like a paranoid idiot to these cops, trying to explain all this crazy shit to them, along with my talk about computer hacking and botnets; it all went right over their freaking heads. I couldn’t make sense of it all myself—but then, isn’t that why I went to the police for help in the first place? That, and because of Katherine’s strange behavior!
And so here I was in the back of police ambulance being delivered to the BUMC psych ward like some FedEx package damaged in transit. Nothing had turned out right this night. All I had tried to do was do the right thing for my family’s safety. Now—somehow!—I’m on my way to the insane asylum to state my case. Kafkaesque my ass. Try Zekesian! Even though the psychological evaluation was “voluntary,” even though everything I had to say about Katherine and the computers was the true, after the way the police had treated me, I was nervous. At first they were listening to me, if only halfheartedly. But, then, suddenly, they were treating me like I was a dangerous psychopath. Obviously, they used the kidnapping threat as a way to pawn me off to the hospital, because they didn’t believe me and didn’t want to be bothered having to do paperwork. Yet they seemed damn serious when they accused me of having taken Katherine’s phone away and refusing to give it back. One problem with it though—it never even happened!
Then I was thinking: This whole mess could have been avoided had the police not separated Katherine and me. Did she tell the police about the hacking? The 4th of July? Did she tell them how the root account was grabbed on the new Macbook we bought a week later, before I’d even finished setting the damn thing up! How did that even happen, anyway? She was there when we returned it to the Apple store; the geniuses couldn’t explain themselves; never saw anything like it before. Did she tell the police any of this? Maybe she did and they treated her the same as me? But why didn’t she tell them I didn’t take her cell phone away? They wouldn’t have been able to accuse me of it then, no? Maybe they didn’t say anything to her? Nothing made sense at the moment.
Next thing I knew the ambulance had turned into BUMC. The modern brick building towered too tall for me to make out the top of it from my vantage point behind the ambulance window. The EMT opened the back door of the ambulance and helped me out, making sure I didn’t slip on the ice and hit my head. I felt like I had just stepped off a prison bus inside the prison yard. The brutal, bone-chilling, cold of this February evening (5:11 pm) greeted me immediately.
#
The events which took place once I crossed the BUMC Emergency Room threshold can be told in greater detail now, with the help of the illuminating discoveries I would make nearly seven months later, after I read my BUMC medical record for the first time. This came after my new attorney, Roland Roman, slid the record to me from across the conference room table in his modest law office. This was after he’d requested and received my record from the hospital, only days after I handed him a bank check for 10K, his retainer. And, at that time, had I not discovered at the last moment an overlooked 20K line of credit that existed through the home mortgage, I wouldn’t have been able to retain Roman’s services, nor the services of any other lawyer. That was because, when the the two Sheriff’s deputies came knocking on the door of my home in Detroit, a couple of weeks before I had even known who Roland Roman was, and apologetically served me (I gathered because they were men and husbands and fathers) with a restraining order and petition for sole custody, filed on Katherine’s behalf in a Connecticut family court by her attorney (who, as it turned out, had two law offices that were, I imagine, anything but modest), I realized that I would need to immediately hire an attorney to defend myself against the protection order and fight the custody petition, so I called the bank, only to learn that the 180K that had been in the account earlier had been withdraw three days earlier, and the checking account now held barley enough money for me to buy a DIY divorce kit off the dollar store spin rack and a bottle of MD 20/20® (aka “Mad Dog”) from the adjacent liquor store. Coco Loco, of course, having been the best choice in flavor fortified wine for the occasion. But at least I discovered the 20K credit line on the mortgage. Had I not, I would have lost everything then, instead of having to wait all these many years to lose more than everything now.
What happened to me once inside of BUMC, is quite simple and easy to understand today. However, at the time, I didn’t understand anything, because I wasn’t told anything. Presumably this was because the doctor might have thought that perhaps I wasn’t in full possession of my mental faculties at the moment, and, perhaps, if she had told me everything at the moment, so that I would understood, that this information would only have served to greatly upset and angered me—as I can tell you now, it most certainly would have. As it turns out, prior to my fateful meeting with Dr. Freudean Unjung, head of the psychiatric ward, located on the 13th floor of the BUMC building, where, honoring my agreement with the police to submit to a voluntary psychological evaluation, I informed Dr. Unjung that I was concerned about my wife’s behavior and safety because she was acting as if she was under duress of some kind, taking pains to describe to the doctor Katherine’s strange behavior in the car, including her fearful look, the lip biting, the frequent side view mirror checking, as if we were being followed by another car, and the apparent safeness of my father’s house in Katherine’s estimation, punctuating all of this with details about the phone and computer surveillance I had discovered, which had been plaguing Katherine and I for the past eight months, and, as I was explaining all of this to the doctor, I even began to realize that I was sounding a bit confused and frightened, yet at the same time I knew I was in complete possession of all my reason and was only speaking the truth, no matter how much sense it didn’t make, and in the self-consciousness of the moment, I could tell by the by the patronizing way in which Dr. Unjung was behaving towards me, in her straitjacket-side doctorly manner, that she was treating everything I told her with even more incredulity than police had what I told them—and this was because, as I would only learn many months after this particular day—Katherine had called and spoken with Dr. Unjung on the telephone long before the ambulance with me and the paramilitary EMT in the back of it even arrived at Bedlam University Medical Center. I was soon to be “Sweating Bullets.”
According to my medical record: Katherine, in her phone conversation with the doctor, told Dr. Unjung that I believed I was being followed by the FBI and CIA. She also told the doctor that I was taking Adderall®—an amphetamine. If Katherine told Dr. Unjung that I was taking this medication because it had been legally prescribed to me for what was then thought to be ADHD (and which I’ve since come to realize was actually Asperger’s syndrome misdiagnosed) I don’t know. Needless to say, there probably couldn’t have been any worse possible coincidence than for me to have been taking Adderall® (pronounced: ADD, er, ALL. The “f” is invisible.) on the one day in my life that I happen to find myself having to submit to a voluntary psychological evaluation in a mental hospital, since, as I would come to learn, by witnessing it, that a good deal of the of the business—and I do mean business—that comes through the doors of a BUMC (or the doors of any psych ward) each day stems (pun intended) mostly from methamphetamine abuse. And although in my case both the “metha-” and “abuse” were absent, I was taking amphetamines; and to the good doctor Dr. Unjung, it didn’t matter that my Adderall® had a “b” for “Barr” stamped into its orange oval pill shape, and that it was manufactured in a state-of-the-art factory in India, while, on the other hand, methamphetamine, is made, like prohibition era gin, in a bathtub, in places like Indiana, using, if I’m not mistaken, ingredients such as Vicks® inhalers and couple of those green Christmas tree Car-Freshners®, the kind that hang on the rear view mirror of your car, all melted together, plastic and all, and stirred with love, because, according to the science of chemistry, Adderall® and methamphetamine are country cousins; therefore, making my ingestion of Adderall® as good as a tick mark for the good doctor on a page out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Diagnostics. Statistics. Manual. Mental Disorders. Hard core medicine, backed by science, in other words.
While all of this helpful information Katherine was giving to the doctor was doing absolutely nothing to help me, in my situation (as intended), it was far from being the most damning part for me, not by a high speed police chase down a country mile, because the most damning part would come when Katherine told Dr. Unjung that, because of my delusional state of mind, that is, my belief that I was being followed by the FBI and CIA, because of my belief that she was being blackmailed, because of my belief that the Chinese and Russians were hacking our computers—I say, because of all these delusions of mine, Katherine feared that I might attempt to kidnap her and Mark. I’ll repeat that: Katherine told Dr. Unjung that she feared that I might try to kidnap her and Mark. Here I was, a guy who’d probably killed less mosquitoes than the Dali Lama being accused of being a potential kidnapper, only an hour after I just drove my family to a police station, because I feared, with good reason, that my wife, my family, might be in danger. This was absurd insanity! Insane that Katherine said this to the doctor, absurd because the doctor believed it. And this allegation was made and accepted without anybody ever informing me of it. It would have been nice to have known that I was a potential kidnapper of my own family—a laugh at the time would have done me good, to ease the pains of my fears.
Who did the doctor believe, Katherine or me? We already know the answer to that. I must assume—since neither Dr. Unjung or Katherine (and why would she?) ever bothered to inform of the fact that I was a potential kidnapper—that this was the primary reason why my voluntarily psychological evaluation had been changed to an immediate involuntary psychiatric hold, before I had even started talking to Dr. Unjung. Katherine’s fears held greater weight than my truth, probably because Katherine acted out her fears brilliantly, and I allowed fear to get in the way of my telling the truth with composure. Someone did tell lies about Peter Zek, for without having done anything wrong he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital one brutally cold winter evening. And his medical record proves it.
I also know from my medical record that during my two month, $98,000 stay (see, I told you BUMC was a business!), locked inside of the BUMC psych ward, denied all freedom and liberty, without even a breath of fresh air during the entire two months, that each time Dr. Unjung was prepared to release me from the hospital the only thing Katherine needed to do to ensure that I didn’t get released was to repeat her fear to the doctor that she believed I might try to kidnap her and my son, which in turn prompted the doctor to change her mind and not release me. Surely it couldn’t have been as easy as all this? No, it was not. But neither was it much more difficult for Katherine to create the kinds of conditions necessary to get Dr. Unjung to change her mind.
I knew nothing about these meetings between Katherine and Dr. Unjung that took place ahead of each time the doctor was considering releasing me, probably because Katherine must have forgotten to tell me about it, she could be absentminded in that way, sometimes. The doctor, strangely, said nothing either—then again, the doctor never talked to me about anything, never informed me of anything, she only ever asked me questions. I was treated like a nonentity without any rights. To raise my voice in indignation over the fact was to only prove to the doctor that I belonged where I was. Isn’t that nice? According to the notes in my medical records, after each meeting between Katherine and Dr. Unjung, ahead of the doctor’s intentions to release me, it was usually on the next day, following one of these meetings, that I would suddenly, and inexplicably, manifest signs of “visible anger, and unexplained agitation” which, being observed the psych ward staff, or the doctor, herself, was noted down in my record. Notes such as: “Mr. Zek slammed down pay phone receiver, uttering foul language, stomped back to his room.” Or: “Stormed out of visitation, visibly upset, agitated.” Another: “after pay phone, returned to room, loudly slammed door to bathroom.” Dr. Unjung, in her own separate notes in my medical record makes it clear that, though she had intending to release me, and on several separate occasions, because of the concerns voiced by my wife, along with my “sudden, unexplained changes” in behavior, days before she intended to let me to, she decide against it, deciding instead to wait until I showed “demonstrable signs of improvement.”
Well, now, if only I had known! If only the good doctor had bothered to ask me why on these few occasions I had become so upset I would have told her what my wife had said or done on these occasions, over the pay phone, or during visitation, to make me “visibly angry, agitated, frustrated.” I, however, would not have been able to account for why these sudden, inexplicable changes in behavior came over my wife, which, on the few occasions when they did happen, sporadic as they were, always came from out of the blue, either while I was talking with her on the pay phone, or while meeting with her at visitation. I would have told the doctor I didn’t know why my wife suddenly reverted that the role of hers, which I’d taken to calling dead pan zombie, because it was like her personality had taken flight. I would have told the doctor, I didn’t know why my wife would pick fights with me out of nowhere, for no discernible reason, or why she called me a “Fuck face!” over the phone and then hung up, refusing to answer her phone, even though I called her back three times. I would have told the good doctor that I didn’t understand why my wife told me in visitation that she’d just had a real estate person go to our house in Detroit to appraise it and get it ready for sale, even though we had only recently settled that ongoing argument, agreeing that we were not going to sell the house, since we were not moving to Connecticut, that we were returning to Detroit—”as soon as I get out of this fucking place.” (Coincidentally, this would not happen.) I would have told the doctor that I didn’t understand why my wife had went an enrolled Mark in a Waldossori nursery school in Connecticut when we lived in Detroit, which was in addition to the disagreement we’d only just settled—he was too young for nursery school, he didn’t like going to nursery school, there was no reason for him to go, and, yes, it was better that he continued to stay home and hang out with me, as he’d been doing all along. I also would have told the doctor that I didn’t understand why, from seemingly out of nowhere, my wife would suddenly became intent on saying or doing anything with her inscrutable, zombie-like, cult-influenced-like, behavior, whatever she could to needle me to the point of frustration and anger, as only she seemed capable of doing to me. Then maybe the doctor could have run to her manual of diagnostics and statistics in order to give me the answers that I needed. But alas! Such a scenario was never to be. Instead I had to remain incarcerated for two months without being given an clear indication why I was there or, worse, why I was being kept as long as was, beyond the fact that I believed my computers were being hacked, as they were, and this, somehow was more than enough justification for keeping me detained against my will in a psych ward.
Dr. Unjung, I should add, didn’t like me very much. One knows these things. If her being a woman of color and my being a white male had anything to do with it, I won’t venture to say, since there is no evidence to suggest it. All I can say, because we know it when we know it, Dr. Unjung didn’t like me—but I suppose I can’t blame her, because in her mind, I was an amphetamine abuser who was preparing to kidnap his family, and one of those dastardly abusive males (you know the kind) who make the lives of poor women, like Katherine, a living hell, and drag them down in their highly successful careers. That this, in my estimation, reflected poorly on Dr. Unjung’s intelligence notwithstanding, for whatever her reasons (Katherine mostly) she believed I was every bit what she treated me as—though the holding of such a belief, for anyone that knows me, would have been nothing short of delusional.
But I am being to lenient on the doctor, for it is more than fair to say that Dr. Unjung was an idiot, not because she was a woman, not because she was a woman of color, but simply because as an individual, she was idiot, straight up. The proof of this is that I was admitted into her psych ward and kept their for two very long, long, long months, despite every indication to the fact, which was simply overlooked, as if something had been missed that was yet to confirm me mentally ill. I would also add that, though I was at the time diagnosed as AS, my being AS, lets call it “my style” worked against me, in a clinical setting, lets just say. Because I was neither “normal” nor was I mentally ill, but if one does not appear “normal” the only category left is mentally ill, somehow. I must add, too, that Dr. Unjung even failed to diagnosis me as AS.
My situation with Dr. Unjung certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that I did absolutely nothing to to hide my contempt for her, and her retinue of idiot interns, for checking me and not letting me checkout, like I was some kind of mentally disturbed cockroach. I also extended the same contempt towards the other doctors that, from time to time, popped in on me, to ask me stupid questions. (Probably because the lot of them were so miffed by this mental patient who didn’t actually talk or behave like any mental patient they had ever seen before, which, probably, suggested to them, in their professional opinion, that I was some kind of new species of mentally disturbed person, one that had heretofore gone unobserved in mental patient wilds, and that being such an insanely clever evil genius in my mental illness, that I had managed to hide from them my true nature—as reported to them by my wife— though given enough time, and enough observation, they would suss me out, eventually. Meanwhile, if they really were looking for such a creature, they needn’t have looked any farther than my “worst half.) I apparently manifested all the classic “signs” of mental illness—I was angry, I displayed contempt, I kept to myself, I didn’t participate in any meetings and therapy, and I answered all of the stupid questions put to me derisively. Clearly, in their professional opinions, mental illness was afoot, they just couldn’t find it. (It is safe to say that the fact that I was actually a sane person with AS forcibly incarcerated in a mental hospital on the basis of hearsay alone was apparently never factored into their considerations of why I was manifesting many of the sacred “signs” as recorded in the logos of the DSM Bible.)
However, unlike the idiot doctor Unjung and her minions, the BUMC staff were cool, probably because they were powerless, which meant they weren’t intoxicated by power and therefore free of arrogance and self-righteousness. And though they were not doctors, not in charge, I gathered that they probably knew more about the patients than the doctors did. They certainly recognized the truth in my situation. The staff would say to me, “Hey Zek, what are you doing in here? You don’t belong here. There’s nothing wrong with you.” And later, after weeks: “Hey Zek, why are you still here?” One of the nurses even pulled me aside once and asked me: “Did you’re wife put you in here to get rid of you?” And it was only then that began to take serious my gut feelings, which I had been doubting, mostly because I didn’t have any proof of it, and because I was in there for being paranoid and suspicious, and being treated like I was paranoid and suspicious, so it was only natural that I started to be on guard, just in case it was true and really was paranoid and suspicious, even though I knew I wasn’t. Yet…. I had a strange feeling that Katherine was the reason I was in the hospital, though I had no evidence; and whats more, who could I reasonably believe that Katherine could single-handily fool a doctor—a fucking hospital! If I dared even dared to voice such a suspicion at the time, they would have thrown me in a padded room and thrown away the key, convinced that they had absolutely made the right decision. Sweet, innocent Katherine? You are an insane man! (I’ve since learned that the Victorian novelist Bulwer-Lytton, author of Zanoni, had gotten rid of his unwanted wife by having her locked up int he asylum, except word got out in public and she ended up being released. She got even with him by writing a book (A Blighted Life, 1880) detailing just how diabolical her famous husband had really been and what he’d done to her. She also devoted the rest of her life to exposing her unscrupulous husband every chance she got. Good for her! And this where I’d gotten the idea to use my own life as material for a writing a new novel, but that was before I was facing destitution. This was the novel—maybe a year to write—that could maybe have helped me to make a new life for myself, but it doesn’t look like that will ever happen. It seems things turned out better for Lady Lytton than will for me. She got her justice. It looks I must suffer my injustices to the bitter end, without the truth ever being revealed.)
It seems I proved a frustrating case for Dr. Unjung, and in her medical ineptitude, I became her guinea pig, her lab rat, for her to malpractice medicine on, by the fact that I never “respond” to any of the anti-psychotic medications that I was forced to take against my will. In her bafflement Dr. Unjung kept switching me back and fourth between Risperidone® and Haloperidol®, since I never “responded” to any of these medications. That is these medicines never healed my “delusions” by causing me to recant my belief that I had discovered my family had been being victimized by a very sophisticated form of phone and computer surveillance. I spoke the truth, and even if they tortured me, I wouldn’t have changed my story, because I wasn’t delusional. The surveillance was real—I just happened to discover it the wrong time.
Each time I “failed to respond” to one of the anti-psychotic medications I was forced to take, it meant that the idiot doctor would have to wait one week to tapper me off the ineffective med and two weeks build up my levels on the replacement med before the doctor could “discover” for herself that the med was ineffective—yet again. This one week/two week med cycle coupled with the med switches for my failure to “respond” was one of the reasons why I ended up in the hospital for as long as I was. All of this was only exacerbated by the fact that Dr. Unjung didn’t trust me. But that was because Katherine, so concerned was she about my well being, wanting to ensure that her dear husband, father to her donor egg son, “got better” as soon as possible, so she told Dr. Unjung, after I told Katherine, that I was spitting out my meds. This resulted in my being forced to take liquid meds instead of the pills. It also caused the doctor to have to start over again with the same failed med, because it might have failed because I was spitting them out. This required three weeks of repeating again what had failed and would fail again. But we should already know by now that nobody knew this better than Katherine. The primary goal behind Katherine’s having me committed to mental hospital in Connecticut was have me kept there for as long as absolutely possible, or at least six months—though she would have smiled (in secret, of course) if it had turned out that they wanted to keep me forever.
Katherine was also the one who gladly informed me (at least she didn’t withhold all information from me) that in some instances Risperidone® and Haloperidol® can cause permanent, irreversible body tremors in those who take it. How nice, since Dr. Unjung kept switching me back and fourth—since I never “responded.” These anti-psychotic meds are supposed to put an end to the kinds of delusions people with mental illness have. In my case, these meds were supposed to put an end to my “delusion” that our computers were being hacked. Yet, no matter what med Dr. Unjung forced me to take, I kept insisting that my computers (and phones) had indeed been hacked and were being used for surveillance purposes. But my continuing to insist that our computers had been hacked, despite my being loaded to the gills with the maximum doses allowable of these various meds, only baffled this idiot doctor. What also flummoxed the good doctor was that, instead of my saying that I no longer believed that I was being followed by the FBI and CIA, I always said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I believed I was being followed by the FBI and CIA, now or ever.” And to prove it, on several occasions, I asked the good doctor a question she would refuse to answer for me. I said: “If I believed that I was being followed by the FBI and CIA, then why in the hell would I ever go to the police? Do people who fear snakes seek refuge in herpetology lab?” By philistine standards I might be judged crazy, but mentally ill I was not. Don’t apply your philistine algorithms to me.
Katherine alone was responsible for causing my incarceration and suffering, but without Dr. Unjung what happened would not have been possible. What is for certain is that Dr. Unjung had allowed herself to be swayed by Katherine’s charms and martyr complex; and, though it saddens me to say it, I believe that Dr. Unjung allowed her feelings and beliefs she held as a woman to influence her bad decision making. Although I cannot say to what extent it is true, I can say that I have no doubt that it was a factor. Katherine was a super successful business woman. Unlike me, her credibility went unchallenged, because she was a woman, because she was successful, and because, who would think for a moment that a wife and mother of such high social standing would intentionally lie and deceive in the way she did? A person would have to be insane to do something like that. (It might also be argued that there was always a grain of truth in everything Katherine accused me of, what made it a lie was that the accusation were attributed to the wrong person.)
Also, didn’t it ever occur to the doctor (and taking Katherine’s career with KWR into account) that maybe my family really was being subjected to computer surveillance? Obviously not. The mentality I faced at this time was like something straight out of the 70s, as if I had claimed my walls and television had been watching me. But this was 2010. Three more years and the name Snowden would become synonymous with surveillance of the most nefarious kind. At the time of my persecution, its clear to me, at least, that I was the only person that was sane—and they were all delusional, because of their naivete, ignorance and indifference. They failed to see the reality of the Digital Age, not me. But Snowden’s revelations came to late help to me. The damage had already been done for me by then.
The doctor’s bad judgment alone does not explain sufficiently enough for me why I had been admitted in the first place, or held as long as I was. Bad doctoring, malpractice? Certainly. But it is America’s mental health care system that is most responsible for the injustices I suffered, primarily because diagnosis and treatment is not grounded in objective medical evidence but based solely on subjective perceptions influenced by personal beliefs, prejudices, opinions—all of which is informed and influenced by whatever happens to pervading in the culture at any given time. Furthermore, like the matrimonial law in America, mental health care is not about health care, it’s about business, about making money. BUMC made 98K for treating me; I wasn’t mentally ill. How much do the BUMC’s of America make on treating those who are mentally ill? The more incurable the disease, the longer treatment must continue. How many mentally ill are not cured simply because they more valuable sick? What a bunch a bullshit. Wake up America. When I think of my experience in BUMC, I think of the following quote by Solzhenitsyn, “It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.”
I don’t know if I was finally let out of BUMC because legally they couldn’t keep me any longer without a judge’s ruling, or if was because I’d finally figured out that —even though, as a sane and healthy person, being forcibly incarcerated in a psych ward against my will, and being forced to take anti-psychotic medications that I didn’t need, gave me every fucking right in the world to exhibit an outrageous level of pissed off, blood curdling anger and contempt, along with all the rightful justification necessary to refuse to attend any meetings or therapy, even though about all I ever really did (excepting when Katherine needed to frustrate and anger me) was walk the hallways and sulk in my room (and I probably would have happily remained in my room forever, if only I could read all day, except the anti-psychotic medications they had forced me to take wouldn’t allow my eyeballs to properly track from right to left, or even left to right, in which case I would have just turned my books upside and read backwards!)—despite being fully justified in behaving as I did, under the circumstances of a mental ward, my behavior only served for idiots like Dr. Unjung as confirmation that I was suffering from a mental illness of some kind, and, so, once I realized what it took to ensure that I would be released—and what it took was absolute conformity, and that was all—I swallowed my pride, hid my anger and contempt, attended the stupid fucking meetings and therapy they wanted me to go to, and I stopped saying that I believed my computers were hacked and under surveillance. However, I did continue to baffle Dr. Unjung when it came to the FBI and CIA question, for if I was to retract and say I didn’t believe it, that would be the same as an admitting that I believed it in the first place. So I said nothing, which is really all they wanted from me. What I learned is that the psych ward doesn’t operate much differently from America itself: once I agreed to conform, once I agreed not to say what was permissible, I was declared normal and given a clean bill of health. They released from one psych ward into another: The Greater Psych Ward Of The Surveillance State Of America. (GPWOTSSOA). When Katherine came to meet me on release day, instead of being happy for me, it seemed she could barley contain her hostility towards me. Had I done something wrong?
#
The next four months that followed my release were surreal—not in an ayahuasca kind of way, but in a really fucked up, I now know Katherine is out to get me so she can take my son away from me and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it kind of way. The problem was that while I had good reason to suspect that Katherine had something to do with my hospitalization, I had nothing but my gut instincts to prove it (though I would find myself singing Stabbing Westward's “I Don't Believe” in the end). Much like when you know your spouse is having an affair (which I was also existent at the time, though it was the least of my problems), but if you don’t have any hard evidence to prove and confront, even if you can feel the truth in your bones, there isn’t much you can do about, not unless you are willing to risk throwing away your marriage, family and everything else, if it turns our you are wrong.
After my release from BUMC, we stayed at Karen’s house in Connecticut—for four months. Initially this was because because I was required to attend mandatory out-patient treatment, which was supposed to last eight weeks, but was shortened to three weeks because of budgetary constraints. This was fine with me, because I wanted to return to Detroit as soon as possible. However, the treatment had been shortened to three weeks infuriated Katherine, who wanted to remain longer in Connecticut, and who would insist far into the future, probably still believing it even today—that I lied about the length of the treatment, just to get out of it; this, despite her being given a formal letter from the doctor in charge of the program. But it wasn’t what she wanted to hear; it didn’t fit her own planes, and because this reality didn’t jive with the reality she wanted, she simply refused to believe me or accept the letter as the truth. It didn’t matter, because she was going to force us to stay in Connecticut anyway. She insisted that Mark needed to finish Waldossorri nursery school—though she hadn’t told me that she went ahead without my knowledge and extended Mark through the summer session. (Then she agreed to cancel and got a refund, but then she changed her mind again and re-enrolled him for the summer.) She also insisted that she needed to continue seeing her therapists (both of them), since I had caused her so much emotional stress with my “problems” and my hospitalization, and because needed to focus on her work and taking of the family, since all of this pressure fell on her shoulders, she wanted to stay and continue with her therapy. Despite my insisting that we return to Detroit, she outright refused to leave until she was good and ready. And since she had gotten herself assigned to a major client project headquartered in Connecticut, it was better for her to be in Connecticut than in Detroit. And I couldn’t force her to return home.
I was in a powerless position because my having been in a mental hospital completely destroyed any credibility I might have otherwise had—and being that I was a white male, I had very little to begin with. Katherine had succeeded in stealing my voice, destroying my credibility. The money was hers, too. Power is proportionate to money. And though we weren’t home, I also didn’t have a job and, if I wanted one, minimum wage—poverty wages— was all that existed for a man in my position. I hadn’t worked a normal job in forever; and the print and book business I had started was long dead, the breath ran out of it when I followed Katherine to Europe; and when returned from Europe, the Internet made a book-based business unsavable, though I tried for a few years, without success. Katherine had tried talking me into take a job at a local bookstore chain. What? I wanted to go back home, she’s trying to get me to take a job at a bookstore. If the past ten months hadn’t been bad enough, now I was trapped and miserable at Karen’s house, controlled by Katherine’s whims and new found sense of superiority over me, now that I was in a weakened position, not physically or mentally, but by stigmatization. I had to be careful—I was “the mental patient.” God forbid I do something wrong, I could find myself back in the hospital. And why not, I had no reason to trust Katherine, no reason to trust the police, no reason to doctors, no reason to trust anything—except Mark. I spent my afternoons with Mark (after school!) playing in the yard, going in the pool, playing trains, cars, Lego, watching cartoons, and listening to our favorite song, "Robot Friends." But there was always an easy feeling overshadowing everything, mostly due to Katherine’s overbearing nature, now that I was the weakened one.
Katherine’s gaslighting behavior also continued, though she had switched gears now. It was no longer necessary for her to keep of the pretense of duress or blackmail, nor did she mentioned the hacking or surveillance as she once did, encouraging me to pursue it with ill intentions; now if I dared to even utter the word “computer” it would have been tantamount to declaring myself insane. Instead the focus of Katherine’s gaslighting became the fact that I had been hospitalized and she treated me, with relish, like I was leper because of it. However, to Katherine’s great consternation, BUMC released me with the less stigmatizing appellation of “psychosis: unspecified” Which, as far as I’m concerned, reads: “We fucked up, but at least we didn’t get ours asses sued.” They had nothing; they didn’t even bother to try and implicate the Adderall. They were at a complete loss in finding any legitimate medical reason to justify my being committed. What the diagnosis should have been is simple: Gaslighting! I say to Katherine’s consternation because she was hopping the hospital would declare me schizophrenia, but this was some kind of tag, your it, fantasy-projection on her part. It certainly had nothing to do with me.
In any case, Katherine’s new gaslighting efforts worked something like this: if I was horsing around with Mark, say tossing him on the couch or wrestling with him, Katherine would say (only if her family was around, never with me, one on one) something to Mark like “Tell daddy to stop being so crazy.” To which Mark, hamming it up (as she knew and expected he would), would repeat: “Stop acting so crazy, dad.” But if Mark repeated it later, she’d say, “Don’t say your daddy’s crazy, that’s not nice.” If Mark and I were playing “cars,” she might come over and say “Can I play? I’ll be the ambulance. Mark, show mommy how to get to the hospital?” Another favorite of hers, and she did it constantly, all the more so when there was little chance of it occurring, she would say Mark: “Careful, watch your head,” “Don’t bump your head,” or “You’ll hurt your head.” Another thing she did then, I guess because it would have been useful in a family court situation, especially when coming to custody—and I was in the habit saying “damn it”— “Mark what does daddy say?” “You say “damn it” dad. This angered me a lot, because she our son to attack me in a way that was essentially disguised to attacking me openly through our son in a manner that essentially hidden. How was I, a former mental patient, accused of being suspicious and paranoid, ever going to prove to anyone that she was playing these kinds of mind games? One immediately begins to sound ridiculous in trying to explain such scenarios, unless the person one is talking to already understands how gaslighting works. That Katherine always did it to me whenever she was surrounded by her Malia kinfolk maybe all the worse, because she and I both knew what she was doing, though I couldn’t say anything in my defense without coming across sounding foolish or paranoid. They were on her side: I was alone. Katherine exploited this to maximum potential. The Malia family even behaved in this fashions with one another, always these thinly veiled comments or insults that couldn’t really be respond to without risking looking like you’re an unreasonable idiot. But this was the environment she was raised in and nobody was better at gaslighting than Katherine Malia-Zek. I was stuck in a nightmare, but had little choice but to endure it.
#
Finally, at the end of August, Katherine was ready to return to return home Detroit. But the more I thought about it, after everything that had already occurred, I no longer felt like I belonged anyplace; I suppose its truer to say that after my experience with BUMC, I felt alienated from everything, America especially—the computer surveillance, the way I had been treated by the police, my hospitalization, Katherine new found sense of superiority and arrogance, had left me questioning everything I had grown up believing as an American. The veil of American Maya had begun to wear thin; nothing was real, nothing true. I hadn’t fully realized it yet, but the lies and deceit that stood behind everything was beginning to become apparent to me. Our life in Detroit, as I had known it, before it had been so violently interrupted by the injustice of my incarceration, now seemed like a fragment of a dream, which, though it contained moment of joy here and there, had no real substance, no continuity, no reality outside of the memory created by dream. There was no longer any connection between Katherine and I. We existed in the same space, but I was starting to feel that a thousand lifetimes separated me from her. Despite her airs of superiority, I saw in her only the worst kind of philistinism and hypocrisy. I found myself pitting her when what I really should have been doing was taking steps to protect myself. But protect myself from what? The lies? Hers or America's?
#
I tried to speak up in my defense back in America, as a father, as man, mostly, but nobody heard me, nobody cared, mostly because they were hating on me because I was a man. And, had I jumped up and down, demanding I be heard by screaming and shouting, it only would have led to America doing more violence to me than it already had, so arrogant and justified did it believe itself to be, standing like the collective that is, hiding behind the pervading attitudes of the day, without a single voice of the intelligent (or otherwise) individual ever ringing out against it. But now that I've already been ousted from my country, for being the unwanted, spit on, middle-aged, white man that I am, facing my end, devoured by destitution, I will speak my message loud and clear with a bit of a dithyrambic diatribe. You can skip it if you like, but it does pertain to my story, in that what I have to rail against was in part responsible for my story's creation.
I had known my place in this world since I was teenager: white Gen (He)X male: “Nonentity.” I knew also that culture is nothing but construct, people bend to culture and not the other way around; so be it. But we should all rather break before we bend. I came from a broken home, poor, raised by my mother and aunt and grandmother. I respected women because I was raised by women; I abhorred male authority of every kind, especially that issuing from white mouths! I discovered solace early in reading and rock ‘n’ roll music. My friends were not just white, black and burnout, many came from diverse cultural backgrounds, which I appreciated and benefited from as a privileged observer, and sometime partaker, as guest. The first girl I ever fell in love with was Japanese; she broke my heart when her family returned to Tokyo. Several of the girls I'd dated were bisexual, others I'd hung out were lesbians. I had many friends that were gay, too. I was anti-authoritarian, defiant, rebellious, dystopian, agnostic mystical atheist Gnostic, tripped out, stoned, drunk and sober. For a time, I was wrongly right leaning, by way of indifference and rhetoric; perhaps even by metempsychosis (long story); I was always democratic in spirit, never by politics (can we say Hypocrites!) I did not discriminate, judge, condemn, point, laugh--unless the person (male, female, white, black, Pythagorean, etc.) made their assholeness known to me, by aiming it at me. Above all, I hated deceit, hypocrisy and bullshit (I had one of those built-in detectors that Hemingway talked about, though mine was on the fritz when it came to Katherine.) above all else. I realized early on that the most important questions and answers concerning life end and begin in eschatology (see, for me, I was beyond thinking about shit like race, color, creed, nationality, etc. In the scheme of living a thousand lifetimes, to identify oneself too narrowly with any of these is like a twelve year old worrying about how the chickenpox he just caught might affect the rest of his life. You'll disagree; I don't care.)
Yet, as I shook off the cultural hypnagogia that had overtaken me in my suburban life with Katherine, the result of succumbing to slumber after so many years of sleep deprivation, and finding myself already well into my state of persecution (though I was yet to fully discern it as such) the lies of this world were finally revealed to me in their totality and became unavoidably clear for me to see; and as I was being propelled down the path of my persecution, all the dirty bliss I had left in me, leaked out on the road behind me like synthetic motor oil flowing out of a punctured oil pan. I was also shocked to find, that because I was a male American white I was the new scapegoat. America, like a scene out of Easy Rider, with new caricature actors, same ignorance, I had bee blown off my chopper, the one with the American flag, because I was male, my skin was white, the resented one, and dragged through the streets and setup on a tree stump in the middle of a city for all to see because I was now the new American pharmakos; or I might just as easily have been dragged down to the river, fastened to a dunk stool, and be given a Medieval waterboarding, to get me to confess heresies not my own. And though, in ignorance, they would probably succeed in killing me, I would die never being what they think and want me to be, because what I am nobody can be--I am myself alone, whatever my gender, whatever my skin color. But it seems it became pretty fly to cast stones at the white guy, though said stones are already stained by history with prejudice, racism, chauvinism, misogyny, xenophobia, ethnocentricity, and the bloodiest stains of them all--stupidity and ignorance, yet they case stones anyway. It has become acceptable today to hate on me for the kind of prison-tomb I wear but did not choose. Bullshit. You target me with your hypocrisy disguised as cathartic purification. But nothing has been purified, because nothing has changed, not so long as the same attitudes prevail, with skin color and gender being the only things that make now different from yesterday. The hypocritical, backlash of an eye for an eye is now in vogue. The strangest thing about it is that people don't see it (and how is neophyte, brought up in rhetoric going to see anything? They have no concept of then and now, all they know is now, and the now is based on the new rhetoric that has been pumped into their heads, so they will defend to the core of their being the right to continue along the same path of ignorance, believing themselves right, just, even entitled, eyeball for eyeball fashion. That I dare to even point this out will lead to me be attacked and criticized, and treated as though I have no right to point out such repeated ignorance, as if my words are somehow intended to inflame rather than heal, that I'm saying something other than smarten up. But those who attack and criticize, and don't want to see the truth of the matter, they are the ones who need look in the mirror. The are the ones who should keep in mind that "It's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the market place." See where the real enemy hides and manipulates from, see that the real agenda is divide and conquer, because when you are looking and pointing at me, your back is facing the real enemy, our real enemy.
It's the same now as it was back then, only time has darkened the page that records the history of such ignorance. For me, personally, I don't give a fuck what you are on the outside, since there are only two kinds of people on the inside--those who are cool and those that are not. And for those who don't want to read the old dead white guys for their literature, then don't fucking read them. But don't be giving duck lips over the value and worth of such literature, for any literature, and art, anything done in the name of humanity, so long as it lives up to what Solzhenitsyn call the "ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty" is good for you soul, no matter what prison-tomb it is enclosed in. Don't be hating, don't hold on to that kind of narrow minded ignorance, as what I'm saying.
But my indignation is not because I'm a white person. It's because I'm an aspie that happens to be white. The truth of the matter is that we are not like any of you; we are like us. And we wear every skin color and culture. But we don't think in terms of skin color and culture because we stand outside of it--all of it. We don't identify, in this case, bottom-up but top-down, because was are not deluded by culture and rhetoric, we have not been indoctrinated into the cultures we live in, and therefore we don't partake of such idiocy as hating on people because of skin color or nationality, or the rest. What concerns us always is simple: Truth. We know Truth through being able to discern all the lies. When you live for Truth, you don't get bogged down by everything that lies below this level, in culture, that everyone fights about back and fourth, because so caught up are they in their particular corner of the dream imparted by culture. We aspies are offended when we get lumped in with the rest of you, who divide and hate and climb and backbite according to your places within the culture. We stand outside of it all, looking in. We laugh at your ignorance and naivete, swayed as you all are by the constructs of culture. We wear our prison-tomb just like you, but we are not like you. My skin is white, but I'm an aspie. My friends skin is black, but she's an aspie. You insult us both when you reduce us down to nothing but the shells that house our souls. Listen up people of the world! Understand this. Don't push all of your delusional agendas on us, don't point your fingers at our kind. It condescendingly offensive to us, though we might not bother to say so. Which is why I write this, because it is time all aspies start saying so; it is time aspies begin to differentiate ourselves from others, not integrate. We see and know things that they cannot. You want world arbiters who are impartial, not swayed by lies of any kind, who don't take sides but call it like it is? Look to your aspies. We would bring peace to the people of this delusional world quickly. The guardians of Plato's Republic are aspies. (Plato was an aspie!) "Imperium."
As I was saying, the vision today might look different from yesterday, but it's the same old shit, with the neophytes glomming on to the rhetoric of the day, parroting what they hear and see, as they are grown, as has been the case for generation after generation after generation. Nothing irks me more today for its ignorance than to read Americans hating on white dudes simply because it's in vogue, and they've been brought up within the most current cultural dream, one that imparts such ideas and messages, and sways and corrupts the thinking of the dreamers, without their realizing it. They don't write as individuals, they write as if they are a product of the times, and I do mean product, very much so. And if you say, that is because we are a product of the times, then you only bring tears to my eyes. It is the pinnacle of ignorance to be hating on something, in this case maleness and whiteness, not because you have reason to hate, not because something has occurred in your life to give you reason to think and act in such a way, but, rather, because you've been manufactured by the culture, like a product, to think and behave in such ways, instead of thinking and acting as you yourself really feel. Women especially, and to a degree, women of color. But please don't mistake me, I don't throw these words out like a net to catch all, because it doesn't apply to all. And those who know, know. I'm talking about women who write with this kind of seething hatred towards men, especially white men, that is so hot that just to touch the surface of whatever contains their assembled words burns one's fingers; words not written through honest and heartfelt thought and feeling, but words assembled as cultural byproduct, made from attitudes that have come through the cultural assembly line, stamped and approved. If its responsible writing, that is one thing, but most of it is just bullshit product thrown out there for others to read and the only thing it succeeds in doing is empowering ignorance.
Yet, and yet, I'm probably just offended because I'm male and wear white skin, and it rankles me to see myself being slagged off in every other line of such writing, assembled from factory produced opinions, containing more plastic than visceral guts. But it offends me more because, though I'm male and wear white skin, I am not what you portray in your writing. I am not that, which means that what you write about it not true. Unless you don't really mean to throw nets with your words, though I think you do. And my reason for ranting on this particular subject, the reason why I'm entitled to rant on, is because it has been just this kind of ignorance (and here, I don't mean women, or women of color, but anyone who writes product that comes off of the cultural assembly line) that led to me getting my white, male ass, handed to me in America, because polymers of beliefs, attitudes, opinions and judgments are cranked out in America have replaced the thinking and reasoning of the individual American, based on his or her own personal knowledge and experience, leveled by impartial, objective, thoughtful and compassionate considerations and plain common sense. Had I encountered just one--one!--such individual in the course of all of my many tribulations and trials, my life in America might have been spared, my son might have his father. But all I encountered was the polymeric plastic thinking of automatons, which has replaced the flesh and blood flow of reasoning and thought.
#
On the planned day that Katherine intended to leave with Mark, in the final days of August 2010, four months after my release from BUMC—and only days after Mark's birthday and our return from her sister’s house in Connecticut, Katherine began rubbing sticks to kindle the fire she hoped would ignite an argument. I no longer remember in detail the provocation she used to start the argument, nor does it matter, because as soon as I failed to be drawn into an argument of any kind she switched tactics. Her only intention was to get me to lay hands on her, and I don’t mean in the Christian tradition. But I was not interested in arguing, as I said, and just let her continue on with whatever it was she was saying. This of course was not the kind of reaction she had expected from me, so predictable had I become to her in all of her years of studying me, but I'm sure I disappointed her, for though it took me fucking long enough, I had finally realized how dog-like and predictable I had become in my marriage.
She was prepared for such possibilities, however, since she had put a lot of hard work and effort into her planning, though for how long is anyone's guess. I don’t know if the irksome little play she was about to run against me was something she invented herself or whether she was coached out of the gaslighting playbook, but she began firmly patting me on the forearm, in the way a kindly grandmother might with a "dear, dear, dear," to comfort you after the death of your beloved pet possum. When I didn't respond to Katherine's provocations and I left the family room for the living room to distance myself from her weirdness, she followed me, sitting down beside me on the couch and started pat, pat, patting my arm, saying, “Peter, you need to control your anger. You’re violent. You need to get help. I think you should talk with someone,” all the while pat, pat, patting away on my forearm. She delivered these lines with all the hallmarks of first class, grade A, bad acting (and she did it deliberately, because it upped the victim's (me) self-doubting quotient; that is, you have to ask yourself: is this really happening or is it just me? Am I the one who's crazy or is it her?) which only made her already bizarre behavior that much more disturbing to me. She spoke in a personality-shorn droning voice, as if the delete key had suddenly wiped the personality of Katherine No.1 away: “Peter, you need to control your anger. You should really talk to somebody about it,” while the annoying arm patting became firmer, more persistent. It was the way in which she kept patting my arm that did more to draw a reaction from me than her bizarre use of non sequiturs: “What the fuck are you talking about Katherine? What anger? I didn't even say anything to you. I left the room to get away from you. What are you talking about, violent behavior? And why do you keep talking in that voice?" Meanwhile, while I’m saying this to her, she was looking at me, her eyes open wide, with a black, swirling, hypnotized look in them, as she continued granny patting me. I pulled my arm away in annoyance, like I had just been static shocked. "Peter, stop being violent. You're being hysterical calm yourself." (We all know how we react to being told to calm down when we're already calm! She was a gifted gaslighter, I'll give her that.)
For all of the malevolent things Katherine had done to me over the past year, for all of the gaslighting paths she lured me down, using them to exploit the protective instincts and concern she knew I had for her, but once peaked, then only to reverse directions, by dropping cryptic statements on top of what had been done or said before, and because the words were ultimately meaningless, designed only to further confuse and obfuscate an already distorted situation, making one forget which end was up, before introducing further injections of bunkum into what has become a nonsensical situation that is just as real as it is unreal, and aimed, in the end, at inducing in the victim an array of head-spinning questions, self-doubts, paranoia, suspicion, irrationality, all of it intended to knock out from beneath one the ground of their mental equilibrium--it wasn’t until this moment that she finally (finally!) removed her mask to reveal the demon she hid behind it and the head games she had been playing with me all this time. She didn't need calumny now, didn't need to get others to do her bidding. It was just her and me. I saw exactly what she was, what she trying to bait me into doing, and in that moment she knew that I knew it, and her hope was that the more violently she could get me to attacker her the better, for such an outcome would almost certainly guarantee that she would be granted the legal right to keep Mark for herself. Eighteen years together, and it all came down to this!
Exasperated, the words shot from my mouth: “You make me so angry, I could choke you!” It was the most she’d managed to ring out of me, which I uttered in a moment of absolute frustration, not only induced by the incessant way she kept patting my forearm and droning on, “You’re violent, Peter, you need help,” but because she knew exactly what she was doing, why she was doing it - and she was doing it to me. That I found it nearly impossible to believe what was taking place only made it more satisfying for her, when, with brown eyes, cold and dead, and with as much empathy in them as an attacking shark, she starred straight into my soul. She stood there looking at me, as if to say, now you know, and there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it, fuck face! I had shared nearly half of my life living and sleeping with this person yet I failed to see the true nature of what I should have had eyes to see and ears to hear. The great revelation was that this world of lies was ruled absolutely by the likes of the nature Katherine possessed.
Yes, my words, uttered out of complete consternation over her absurd droning accusations and emotionless behavior, not to mention all the craziness I endured over the course of the previous months, might indeed look quite threatening, quite menacing - as words on a page, and especially so to any judge tasked with reading these words and judging them. But my words were about as threatening to Katherine as a wounded baby seal would be to a dinning great white shark. After failing to provoke from me the the violence she wanted, she stamped out of the room and noisily went about the house collecting the prearranged belongings she had set out and packed her shit. Then she packed Mark's rolling Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase with his clothing - also set out prearranged - and a few toys. Once she was packed up and ready to walk out the door with Mark, I knew she was expecting me to stop her, with violence if necessary, not that it would have made a difference either way. Instead, I knelt down and said goodbye to my son, adding at the end: “You know daddy loves you, right?” “I know, dad,” he said, and he gave me a big hug. (And what was it that Katherine had told Dr. Unjung that she so feared I might attempt to do to my family if given the chance? If no such thing as premeditated projection exists, it does now!) Then Katherine, with haughty arrogance, informed me that she was going to her sister's house (yet again!) because she “needed time to think.’ She said she’d be back in about a week. Turning back to wave goodbye to me, I watched my son leave. A moment later the wheels of her BMW angrily bit the driveway and she tore away. I followed the car through the treeline as it moved down the road, watching until I could see it no longer. I stood there alone in the driveway, before the towering concrete walls and glass of our modern contemporary home, birds were singing in the trees, lawnmowers and weed whackers groaned and whirled their way across the wide green suburban lawns of the narrow minded. I heard the neighbor's kids shouting and splashing in their pool; I smelt the burning charcoal of a freshly lit BBQ as it wafted past on a light breeze. A restored '69 Camaro quickly roared past the driveway; the last of the day's sun filtered through the line of tall trees separating our property from the street; our weed-free lawn glowed emerald green, and I felt the heat radiating up from the blacktop driveway. I knew, before I shut it behind me, the sound the front door would make.
Four days later, to my incredulity, two sheriff’s deputies were knocking at my door in the way only sheriff's deputies knock on doors--I was served (apologetically, as I've mentioned. It was an oddly bittersweet moment, one I would come to reflect upon many times.) I signed for the restraining order and the petition for sole custody. If the Word is God, then paragraphs of family court legalese giving credence to slanderous allegations is the Devil. The order of protection said that I was mentally ill (it called me schizophrenic, in projected self-condemnation), that I had been committed to a Connecticut mental institution for two months for being paranoid, psychotic, and taking amphetamines. It said that in front of my three year old son, I’d threatened to choke my wife to death. Page after page after page of accusations followed, listing all of my many alleged misdeeds and strange patterns of behavior; all the gosh awful situations I'd put Katherine through over the past couple years, including my various delusions about computer hacking, and China, and my delusional belief that the FBI and CIA were following me. It terminated with Katherine expressing her fear that I might try to kidnap her and my son. The message to the judge: I was a beast of a man, mentally ill, who had drained this poor woman of every wonderful thing she had ever achieved or had hoped to achieve for the sake of her family, and because of my illness and disturbing behavior, I had damaged her career, threatened her life, and destroyed what would otherwise have been a happy, prosperous American family. She was kind enough to state as an aside that she believed I would never do anything to hurt my son.
Katherine filed for the protection order and petition of custody in a Connecticut family court claiming we--as a family unit--lived in Connecticut, at her sister's house (for some reason she failed to mention our accommodations in the attic crawl space when we did stay at her sister's house). It turns out that Katherine, using her sister's Greenwich address, had been working over the past year, unbeknownst to me, to establish "our" residency in Connecticut, hence the reason behind the many trips we'd made to Karen's house, spaced out over a period of six months, under the ruse of Katherine needing to attend to important KWR meetings and clients based in Connecticut. (And as I would later ascertain from the legal documents, Katherine had gotten herself assigned by KWR to two Connecticut headquartered clients--with help from Roger Twinnings). More importantly, the need to establish a twelve months residency in Connecticut was the reason why Katherine needed to get me committed to a Connecticut mental hospital - and doing everything in her power to see that I was forcibly kept there as long as possible. Also, a year later, rifling through a box of papers one day, I discovered some that Katherine had been doing research on mental illnesses like schizophrenia, included among these printouts was a list of Connecticut mental hospitals, and information on the state's laws in regard to committing family members.
Residency was also the reason why, once my hospitalization maxed out at two months, and my out-patient program was reduced to three weeks, Katherine became distraught, and angry with me, not wanting to accept the truth from me (and how could someone like this ever accept truth from anybody?), and, therefore, why, having no other guises to hide behind, she simply flat out refused to leave Karen's house and return home for another four months, despite my weekly protestations. On paper it certainly did suggest that we lived in Connecticut, though the gaps from the first six months could be discerned, and were, from a legal standpoint. While I was in the hospital, Katherine went about running up charges--gas, groceries, shopping, BMW services, etc., -- on the reserved “Connecticut only credit card.” This also included the many needless trips Katherine made to the doctor with Mark, because this would serve as highly suggestive proof to any court, especially at a glance, which about all one gets (or in this case needs) from a family court in America, that we indeed did live in Connecticut. The same motive was also behind Katherine enrolling Mark in Waldosorri school (and intentionally switching from one private school to another, solidifying it as an unquestionable manufactured truth) and insisting that we stay all the many months (plus tacked on summer program) until he finished. Mark, by the way, absolutely hated going to this school; he was too young. My fear was that like me, this bad early experience, feeling he was being forced into school, which he was, would turn him off from school completely, as it did me. I argued with Katherine about it--but I was the "mental patient." How much could I assert my will as his father before called, so to speak, the American dogs on me? (As I said, I had no actual proof yet of what Katherine had done, by the threat of my being "mentally ill" loomed over me at all times.) The same went with all the other “activities” she made Mark attend, while I was in the hospital and after I got out. Mark wasn't much interested in these paid activities either--music classes, swimming, play centers, etc. (I didn't know then that I had AS, but I knew myself, knew Mark was like me, and I knew that Mark was not comfortable at his age in any of these overwhelmingly social situations. Again I protested, but Katherine did what she wanted and I was powerless to do much to stop it. All I could do was try to make the experiences less traumatizing for Mark as possible by always making sure I was there with him, school being the exception. Remember, he was only three at the time. It was like I was being forced to watch over again my own childhood getting messed up for reasons quite similar.)
The only reasons why Katherine finally agreed to return to Detroit was to drop me off. It's that simple. That is, start the argument with me, hopping that I push or hit her, so she could grab Mark, dash on back to Connecticut, file the protection order and custody petition; and, by leaving me thinking that she was going to return after a week, she gave herself time to do what she needed to do legally, before I knew what was going on. By all of the details now known, it suggests that, at a minimum, Katherine would have already known what she intended to do fourteen months in advance of setting her plan into action, if doesn't go back even further, by months, for years, to before I had even heard of an egg donor recipient.
After appearing at my first court date in Connecticut, with my newly retained attorney, which, had it not been for the 20K line of credit on the mortgage, almost ended up being no attorney, I returned to Michigan, Roman's advice, and filled for divorce, on the grounds of psychological abuse. Several weeks later, when I returned to Connecticut for the court hearing itself, the Connecticut judge ended up throwing the order of protection and petition for sole custody out, along with any claims to Connecticut residency. In other words, the Connecticut family court had no jurisdiction in the matter.
Before the Clerk of the Court's seal had dried on the court order, Katherine's attorney had appealed the court's decision. Now the matter went to the Connecticut Supreme Court. It would take fourteen months in all for the matter to be settled. It ended with the higher court throwing out the petition for custody. However, it remanded the issue of the restraining order back to the lower court, stating that the lower court judge should not have ruled to dismiss the protection order without having conducted a trail. Katherine and her attorney agreed to settle the matter by dropping it. This didn't matter to Katherine, since all of this time had served her purposes, she had been able to keep Mark with her in Connecticut for fourteen months. During the whole of the fourteen months that restraining order remained in effect and I was legally ordered not have any contact with Mark, not even by phone. (The same applied in regard to my contact with Katherine. While I didn't care if I saw her ever again, part of her motive was to keep me away from her family in friends, and even from being able to talk to her, this way I had no way of ever communicating the truth to anyone, or even the chance to talk some sense into Katherine.)
#
Then came the divorce in Michigan, which, to my anger and dismay, judge, Wilma Muriel, put on hold essentially, until all the legal matters in Connecticut were first settled. The judge declined to rule on the petition my divorce attorney, Zelda Harrington, filled to have Katherine return Mark to Michigan, on the legal grounds that, as a child, he had been improperly removed from his home state. Since the judge, by declining to rule on the petition, allowed Katherine to remain with Mark in Connecticut for fourteen months, it seems fair to conclude that Judge Muriel sided with Katherine. Even once the the legal matters in Connecticut had been concluded and the divorce properly begun, Judge Muriel sat on the petition, declining to make a ruling, thus allowing Katherine to remain with Mark in Connecticut. It probably also fair to assume that, though I might have appeared to be normal to the judge in the courtroom, according to the two months I'd spent in a psychiatric ward, I was mentally ill at some point (once mentally ill, always mentally ill, or so goes the mentality), I did allegedly threaten to choke my wife to death, and according to the court papers filed by Katherine's attorney, Katherine feared that I could possibly try and kidnap her and my son. I don't need to surmise, I know this woman judge didn’t like me, not after reading all of the allegations made against me by Katherine, not after learning that I was mentally ill. I would say, so far as the judge went, my fate had been sealed.
In all of the matters pertaining to the divorce, not surprisingly, Katherine intentionally dragged her feet on everything, the hope being that I would run out of money, since she took all the money herself, she knew exactly how much "found" money I had, and she also knew that most of it had already been wasted on futile, for me, legal proceedings. The only reason I found the 20K line of credit was because Katherine had overlooked it, forgot to dispose of it ahead of time. Judge Muriel did not make Katherine return any of the 180K she removed from the joint checking account, nor did the judge press her on accounting where every dollar of that money had gone; Katherine claimed she used it for her legal expenses. (Had I thought to take the money myself, since I did have a chance, before I knew what Katherine was going to do, I would have been forced to return, for face legal sanctions, of this I have no doubt.) The judge did order Katherine to pay the mortgage ($2,500) and to give me $600 a month for expenses, while the divorce proceeding were ongoing. (And I suppose this is how Katherine, perhaps being cute, came up with the amount of money from the sale of the Jeep that she would send me each month, though sometimes she sent me a little more.) As things dragged on in the divorce (as they had dragged on already for fourteen months with the battle of the restraining order and custody petition), week after week, month after month, with nothing ever happening, I was at least now allowed to see Mark again. The judge ordered alternating visitation with Mark, one month in Michigan, one month in Connecticut; Katherine was to pay the airfare. Though I could barley afford the Connecticut trips, they were a chance to bring Mark and my father together again. During my time with Mark, during visits or each during our telephone calls, while I loved the time with my son, I was always in constant fear of what Katherine might do, I knew, as a father, I had no power, no rights.
One year passed in the divorce proceedings: Katherine refused everything suggested by the mediator over several separate attempts at mediation. When it came to settlement, Katherine rejected each and every offer of settlement I made. The conditions Katherine demanded for settlement could not be called offers, since they never included the offer of joint custody. I never made any selfish or unreasonable demands for anything from her. I’d even gone down to what most would have considered unreasonable for me, considering Katherine’s half-million a year salary, the house, our belongings, including art and antiques, 500K in 401K, plus additional money in retirement options. Though Katherine abandoned me to the house nearly two years earlier, which I had no money to maintain, she refused to agree to selling it, and the Judge had no power to order the house be sold. Without selling the house, their would be no money for me, without selling the house there could also not be any settlement offer, though I offered her he house and she refused. After more than a year had passed, the reason why we couldn't reach a settlement was simple: Katherine wanted sole custody of Mark; she didn't want me to have custody of my own son, at all.
Aside from the inexorable divorce process going nowhere, during my visits with Mark, during our phone calls, Katherine’s same gaslighting behavior continued, with the mental games becoming more pernicious now than ever before, since it was easy for her to involve Mark in these creepy exchanges. If I said anything to her about her behavior, God only knows what she might have accused me of in return; certainly it would start with her declaring me delusional, paranoid, mentally ill, abusive--and now there was a child directly in the middle of the situation, which only made everything more dangerous, most especially because Katherine was prepared to do whatever it took to keep Mark for herself. Because I had visitation with Mark now. I also feared, especially when I made the Connecticut trips, that if Katherine decided to accuse me of something again, anything, because of the fact that I'd already been hospitalized in the state, I could find myself facing new and even more serious legal problems, even if she only called the police on me. In which case, I could find myself back in BUMC before I could say One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. After what had already happened to me, I had no reason to have faith or trust in anything regarding my well being in matters having anything to do with American social institutions, law enforcement, courts, or any fucking thing else. America, for the reason just described, would only become more dangerous for me, after I lost my divorce attorney, because Katherine was in control, Katherine had been the legally recognized custodial parent for the past two plus years, Katherine was the previously threatened wife previously granted a restraining order, Katherine was the one who feared I might try to kidnap her and my son, and I was a man, "mentally ill."
My attorney, Zelda Harrington, told me at one point in the case, during the settlement phase, that in her fifteen years in the “divorce business,” this was the most difficult case she’d ever seen. For obvious reasons, I knew from the start that Katherine was never going to settle, but try explaining everything I had come to know about Katherine to anyone. Even if you could get them to give you enough time to listen, they would never believe the things they were being told. As it was, though my attorney's had a fair idea of what had really happened, by hospitalization still stigmatized me in their eyes, they never could be one hundred percent sure about me, at least that was the feeling I always had (Roland Roman being the only exception, the one person who ever helped me.
The only way I was ever going to get a divorce and get my son back was if I took Katherine to trial and proved in a court of law all of the horrible things she’d done to me. However, when my retainer finally dropped below 10K, my attorney, Zelda Harrington, dropped me. I couldn’t afford to take Katherine to trial, and nobody knew that better than Harrington and her firm. No attorney was going to waste time and resources going to bat for me in a trail against someone like Katherine, not unless there was money to be made, and there wasn't, not from me. With no attorney, I no longer felt safe dealing with Katherine, not after everything she'd done to me already, not with her still getting the same legal advise she been getting, from long before I even knew what was going one, from her high-priced attorneys and others. was getting from her high-priced attorneys and others.
#
Knowing that all was lost, I made the decision to leave America, go to Hanoi. I can't even say why I chose Vietnam, why Hanoi, even. The decision seemed to come upon me, strange as it sounds. Maybe all of those years as a kid, sitting in front of the television, being exposed to Vietnam through war coverage and films left some kind of subconscious impression on me. I wasn't looking for the kind of life that people readily attribute to Bangkok when it comes Southeast Asia. I knew that I had to do two things: leave America, at least of a time; and write my book. If only I could get my book written and published--gain a voice, gain some credibility, then maybe I could come back fighting again. I also thought that maybe if I left America, that maybe, after some time, with some perspective, Katherine might come to her sense, look to want to finally settle, make things right, at least for Mark’s sake. In the taxi, on my way to the airport to catch my flight to Hanoi, I listened to "Scarlet Letters" by Mudvayne.
My first year in Hanoi passed quickly, along with my money, which was about 9K, scraped together after selling everything I owned that meant anything to me on eBay. I should have used it to hire an attorney, some might say. If I thought it would have made a difference I would have. After the three years of hell I’d been put through in America, staying calm, taking my persecution in stride, retaining my insanity throughout, even while be locked up inside of BUMC. and doing everything I could to fight the injustices heaped upon me, without success, I needed a release. I’d spent my first year in Hanoi downing beers, draining bottles of Jameson, and pondering my novel. (My nights out were fun, but the time in the hotel, alone, was Deep Purple’s “Blind Man” in mood.) I was afraid to write; my novel was the only thing I had left; I didn't want to lose it by discovering that I couldn't write. I was a middle-aged man with no career, no degree, no money, no voice, no credibility; there were no other opportunities for me--except writing. If I failed at it now, I failed for good.
When $800 a month working as a foreign language editor at the Hanoi Times came my way through a friend, I had jumped on it. It was the only chance of an income I would ever have. It hadn’t been lost on me either, that in coming to Hanoi with the intention of writing my novel, and after the problems I'd had in America with Katherine, in my being broke, in my landing this editing job, my age, that I was following a path similar to the one Henry Miller trod when he went left America for Paris, looking to write what would become Tropic of Cancer; one of the few books I have in my possession. I didn’t write during my eight months with the paper. That I had was surviving seemed to be enough, for the time being. However, when I could no longer stall on physically producing my journalism degree from from Columbia, I lost the job. Teaching was out, also because of degree, simply because it is no longer as easy as it once had been. In any case, for someone like me, with my AS, my shyness, teaching (and without being a "real" teacher) would have been fate not much better than the one I already face. I had one option left to me: I had to write.
I finally set to work on my novel, what I called my "Orphic novel," all seven hundred eighty thousand words, mostly notes, that I amassed over eight years. I worked at for several months, until it came time that I had to make a visa run to Laos. The day before I left one of the two Apple computers I owned had suddenly been bricked, a remote-kill command issued knowing the computer out at the firmware level. I can't give an answer to why. I had been dealing with these computer problems for years; it wouldn't be the first time that I've had my computers (and phone) toasted in this matter. A week later, after I returned from Laos, my second Apple computer got bricked, but not before I discovered that this computer was setup, surveillance-wise, much the same as the I’d uncovered on my computers years ago, in the US. I even dueled on the computer with a live operator, that is, someone remotely connected at the same time, but the more I battled to to take back control of my computer the more the person behind it, step by step, locked me out of my own computer. Even to go online to reinstall the OS didn't work because the computer wouldn't connect to Apple's website but a connection to some other site that only resulted in the same corrupted OS being reinstalled again. They owned this computer, as they always had. Without going into all the technical details, the source of the surveillance, the style, was the same as had been with me from 2009, assuming it hadn't actually started in 1999.
After I came out of BUMC, I ignored anything to do with computer hacking, even though I knew my computers were compromised. I had had too much to deal with to worry about, beginning first with Katherine, then later with all of my legal problems. I didn’t bother to look under the computer’s hood, so to speak, because I didn’t want to know what was there. As I've mentioned, unless you see physical evidence of computer hacking, it is very easy to convince oneself that it doesn't exist, assuming it is ever noticed to begin with. Even though I was using a new computer, after I came out of BUMC (one that remained in the box, and with Katherine while I was in BUMC), I assumed this one had been compromised just the same, but I ignored it, simply because I didn't give a fuck anymore, and it had already caused so much trouble in my life to begin with, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway. I did this all the way up until the time my computer was bricked, as I was preparing to leave for Laos. As I battled with my surveillants (meaning, I went on my computer each night, lamely trying to wrest control, while somebody was on the other end, essentially monitoring what I was doing, since I didn't have root control of the machine, only limited administrative rights), it finally ended with a series of shutouts. First they bricked the computer’s power pack (quite vindictive, kind of like a, take that!), which prevented me charging the computer, meaning once the battery drained the computer was done. So, naturally, I switched to the second power pack I had from the computer they had previously bricked. When I made the switch, and they realized I had a new power source, they killed this power pack, and to finish everything off, they issued a set of command (I assume) and just killed the firmware of the computer, as they had done with the first one. The USB flash drive that I used to back up my novel had also been hit with a remote-wipe. My novel was lost, all my data gone, all of my pictures and videos of Mark gone with it. Nearly two years had passed now. I had nothing, gotten absolutely nowhere. I was almost out of money. And Katherine had no intention of letting me have contact with Mark. It took me over a year just to get one photo of Mark out of her.
#
I had no choice now, if I still hoped to save myself and make that new life for myself. I needed to start writing a new novel. The only material I had was the seven years tragedy of my life. I started writing again--by hand, with pencil and paper, since I no longer had a computer, couldn’t afford to buy a new one, and wouldn’t have wanted to use one, if I could, since I was sick and tired of being electronically spied on. When I was down to my last $500, I had no choice but to ask Katherine if she would sell my Jeep for me. I had left it at my brother’s house before coming to Hanoi, though he’d already passed away by this time. I also learned that within a year of my leaving America, Katherine had sold the house, though she refused to sell it during the divorce, using it derail my attempt at obtaining a divorce from her. How did she manage to sell without my signature? I still don’t know. She did agree to sale the Jeep though. I was surprised, but glad. She also sold the Jeep without needing to ask me for a signature. This was when she finally sent me a photo of Mark. I thought with her agreeing to help me with the Jeep, and in the sending me the photo, that maybe she was having a change of heart. I was wrong. And instead of selling the Jeep and sending me the money, as she agreed, she instead sold the Jeep and sent me $600 a month. She was being cute, I guess, since this had been the amount the court had once ordered her to pay me, though that had ended after I lost my attorney and the divorce fail through. Occasionally she even sent me $800. How kind of her.
But life for me just continued to harder as money got tighter. When the visa law changed, the price for visas increased. When the allotment of in-country renewals was reduced, it forced me to have to make more frequent visas runs to a Laos or Cambodia, which only cost me more money. Meanwhile I continued writing--by hand. But it was just endless writing, not a novel. It had no plot, no shape. Time passed. I wrote and I chained smoked, my only luxury, since cigarettes cost forty cents a pack. They curb the appetite too, which was good, since I usually only ate once a day. My writing seemed to be getting nowhere. Life became harder and harder. I never had enough money to cover all of my expenses in any given month. I couldn't even afford to buy a coffee maker, so I drank instant coffee instead. Books are expensive here. Once, I treated my self to The Complete Novels of Kafka for 380,000 dong (about $16) , it bankrupted me for the rest of the month. As it was I often finished the last weeks of every month with no money, just enough for smokes and instant coffee. On the title page of the Kafka book I wrote, “I had two choices: nourish my body or nourish my soul. Once the food is eaten, it's gone. Kafka, on the other hand, would keep me company through the cold, hungry winter nights in Hanoi.” The past visa runs I’d had to make screwed up what semblance of a budget I once had. I got behind in bills, got behind in everything. I’ve never recovered.
Summer came, hundred degree days with eighty percent or higher humidity. I couldn’t afford to run the air-con, since I could barley pay the electricity bill without using it. I developed severe heat rash on my neck, stomach and arms, which was made worse by writing, sweating in the folds of skin where my elbow bent. Bright red welts with white puss yokes in the middle covered my skin. They felt like mosquito bites delivered by a division of angry red ants. My mattress, on the floor, was so old and worn out, that it felt like sleeping on wire coat hangers covered over with a sheet. I would wake in the morning with my internal organs drained of blood, my circulation cut off from where the mattress coils had bitten circles into my flesh. Since losing my glasses two weeks ago, during that night out with Finn, mysteriously, after I went to put on my eyeglasses in the morning, these are the all-purpose everyday pair that I use (they're old triathlon cycling glasses), I found that the prescription on one of the lenses had been wiped away, rendering them useless. How could this have happened? They were fine when I set them down on my desk before going to sleep! I have one more old pair left, distance glasses, like the ones that I lost that night with Finn. They work great for looking at the stars and planets at night, but that's about it. Now, using the computer Ha bought with the money she borrowed from her mother, I can barley see the screen to type of up my story, the headaches they give me are excruciating. If I could afford to by two bottles of Coke, I could probably fashion a better pair of prescription lenses from them than these. This glasses thing is a great example. Not only had I not caught a break once in the past seven years of my troubles, but now it seems that life conspires against me to create problems out of thin air, problems that occur for me in the most inexplicable ways, seemingly for no reason at all beyond making my difficult life even more difficult. I hardly leave my room now and still bad things find a way to happen. I don't even worry about not having luck in anything I do, I just wonder what is going to happen to me next. Which reminds me, two night ago, I went to pull the plug of the hotplate out of the outlet, I got jolted with electricity, dropped to my knees. Ha said there's a problem with the plug. Really? So I grabbed the cord lower down to yank it from the outlet and got jolted again with electricity and fell to my knees. Turns out the rats had been gnawing holes in the wire because of all the grease on it. I think I should have died--twice! Yet I didn't.
#
Finally, coming around to where my story began. Just about two weeks ago, now, I asked Katherine if she could send me a few hundred extra from “our money.’ That was what she made a point of calling it throughout our many wonderful years together. I told her I needed it, as I've said, to help cover the cost of my rent and visa renewal, adding: “So I won’t have to live like a dog again this month too.” I also asked her to wish Mark Happy Birthday for me. It was pointless for me to say or write anything beyond that. I suspect that he believes she never heard from me again, since the last time I saw him.
When she sent me the email six months ago, in it she asked me to write to Mark. She said Mark has been looking for you, he misses you, and he’s been crying for his father - “He wants to know where you are, Peter. Write him!” She brought me to tears. Naturally, I wrote him a long email, as I've said. I thought again, at the time, by her words, again, that maybe this was the change of heart from her that I’d been waiting for, now that Mark was getting older. Could it be possible? She never replied after that. Why the hell would she send me an email like that and then not bother replying after I write?
Well, when I asked her for the money two week ago, she did reply, and I then knew why she asked me to write the email, why she sent the Jeep money monthly instead of in a lump sum. She must have looked like such a sad little angel before the judge, explaining how her good for nothing husband up and abandoned her and her child. About how out of concern, and the goodness of her heart, she still sent the bastard money every month. I wonder if she even bothered to read the email I sent Mark, which described to him what living in Hanoi was like?
She wrote: Peter, I’ll tell him you said happy birthday. You’ve been asking for photos again. Here’s Mark from summer camp ages six, seven and eight. There is no more of “our” money. I have been the one paying all of our joint debits the past five years. This is the last $600 I’m sending you. Anyway, we are divorced.
-Katherine
Divorced!
I replied: Katherine, if you leave me like this I’m a dead man. I signed it: “M.E.”
What to do now? I recalled one of my favorite passages from Plato’s Republic (496c-e). I put on “Ruiner” by Nine Inch Nails. I put pencil to paper.
5\17\2019
Notes:
5\17\2019
Notes:
Akathisia describes the uncomfortable inner bodily experience that are a side effect of taking antipsychotics, and how much more when you're forced to take antipsychotics you don't need.
Comments
Post a Comment