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linkspooky · 5 years

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Dazai and Chuuya: Ningen Shikkaku

Chuuya and Dazai are one of the most heavily discussed partnerships in the manga. The two of them are clearly set up as foils the same way Atsushi and Akutagawa the main character and the main rival are. However, while Atsushi and Akutagawa are “different, but the same” in a way that makes them come into conflict the partnership between Chuuya and Dazai reads differently to me. Rather than “different, but the same” its “Different, but desires the same” as both Chuuya and Dazai desire to live as human beings but go about achieving that in completely different ways.

For more analysis on “Double Black” or “Soukoku” and their connection to “Ningen Shikkaku” or “No Longer Human” the author Osamu Dazai’s most famous work, read under the cut.

Double Black is a partnership that functions despite the two characters seeming hatred of one another. It’s a rivalry and a friendship in one, because while both of them are constantly competing and put off by one another.

Both Chuuya and Dazai also know each other well. They are so familiar with the other so much so that the other functions as an extension of their own self. Therefore their hatred of each other comes not from being unable to comprehend the other but rather familiarity. They hate each other because they know each other. They also, get the other.

I would go one step further to say both of them see each other as a person, in the others eyes, which is also something that frustrates them. When Chuuya is introduced to Dazai in Fifteen it’s all too easy to see him as a suicidal maniac or a cold blooded mafioso. However, against CHuuya’s own wishes he comes to understand Dazai by the end of the story as someone who wants to live.

1. On Dazai and Human Beings

Dazai as well has a tendency to not see the people around them as people. While not extreme as Dostoevsky is, Dazai is manipulative, and explicitly has been referenced several times to move people around like chess pieces on a board.

It’s important to notice that Dazai’s behavior is not just the result of him being a brilliant mastermind. Though, it is a symptom of him being so smart it is practically a flaw in his character. If you read Dostoevsky as a foil to inform us on Dazai’s mindset (as Dazai tends to be cagey about where his own thoughts and beliefs lie especially to the audience) then, Dazai’s thinking is similiar to Fyodor he can read the thoughts of others so well that it’s hard for him to consider them an equal unless they have the same level of intellect as him.

In other words Dazai is so used to being the smartest person in the room, that it’s done the exact opposite for his development. Oda in general has always had the best read on Dazai.

‘‘That guy is just a child who’s too smart. Just a crying child who’s been left alone in the darkness, a world of nothingness far emptier than the world we can see.’’

Dazai is so smart he can read the situation while literally in jail with little to no contact with the outside world, just because he’s predicted the actions of everybody involved probably weeks in advance, then relay those orders to Ango. His method of planning is always to make plans on his own that predict the actions of others, and then trusting that they will follow through on his predictions of them without even telling them what he expects. Dazai is able to anticipate their actions in certain situations so well, it begins to seem as if they are not complex organisms independent from him with their own thoughts and feelings, but instead pre-programmed npcs on the rails serving their role in his game.

This predictive ability is something that has utterly stunted him as a person. We know nothing about Dazai as a child beyond his relationship with Mori, and the fact that he was already suicidal at fifteen years old but imagine what it must be like growing up when you are already smarter than most adults you meet. Children need adults to guide them in their formative years. However, Dazai who even as a child is already smart enough to see the hypocrisies present in the adults trying to guide him (Mori again, who was probably the worst person to raise someone like Dazai, but more on that later) Dazai is someone who has absolutely no incentive to grow up. Therefore he stays a child in the darkness, therefore he stays lost.

It’s Dazai’s natural tendency to not see people around him as human beings capable of making their own decisions, and with a rich internal world that is separate from their own. It’s also a flaw he has to fight against. This is why we see him despite Akutagawa’s desperation for a connection with him, separating himself from Akutagawa unless he needs something from him. This is why even though he does genuinely trust and value the Detective Agency, why Dazai has a habit of going off on his own, never informing the others of his actions and his intentions until it comes time to make a decision. While Dazai is better than Fyodor, this is still manipulative behavior. Here’s the thing the less information you let another person have the less control they have over the situation. Especially if when it comes time to make the decision you frontload them with all of the information that you were holding back all along with the intention of pointing them to the decision you want them to make. Dazai does this all with good intentions, but he still relies on his tricks from his mafia days to achieve them. Dazai doesn’t trust other people with all the information, up front, and trust them with transparency of his intentions.

In that way he doesn’t give them full free independence to move. Dazai is so good at reading people on the surface, and the way they act externally, that he basically has no interest in their internal worlds at all.

Dazai enjoys humans as a whole, he wants to help them rather than Fyodor who wants to kill them to save them from their own sinfulness. However, it’s important to recognize he still talks about humans as a whole like an outsider of the group. As if he’s an observer looking at the herd of humanity, and something else rather than a human being himself.

Which finally ties to the literary influence in Dazai’s character. A lot of this comes from Ōba Yōzō, the protagonist of no longer human, a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who is instead forced to uphold a facade of hollow jocularity.

Yozo speaks over and over again about human beings as a whole as if they were some kind of aliens he was never meant to understand.

In other words, you might say that I have no understanding of what makes human beings tick.

[...]

I might have already been disqualified as living among human beings.

[...]

I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only known that one thing I should never had to dread human beings so, nor should I have opposed myself to human life, nor tasted such torments of hell every night.

[...]

I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complication of human beings.

[...]

I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others, (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether human beings possess this faculty.)

Especially with the last quote it becomes apparent what Yozo’s real issue is. He is unable to see himself as a human being, and therefore he projects his dehumanization and sense of alienation onto all others. It’s not Human Beings as the problem, but rather Yozo’s complete inability to see, or treat other people as people that leads to his further isolation from them.

Which connects to Dazai’s character really well. He sees himself as some kind of nonliving thing, a corpse that keeps walking around delaying his eventual suicide, and therefore he does not see other people around him as people too. He projects that they are the ones who are far too difficult to understand, who are far to seethrough and transparent that he sees all of their hypocrisies and is afraid of them. Yet, Dazai never confronts his own hypocrisies either even though he is rife with them. He projects outward his fears about himself onto other people, but it’s Dazai who understands himself the least, and it’s Dazai who sees himself as the least human.

Notice that Dazai’s sense of alienation may come from his intelligence, but at the same time his one and only friend and the most important person in his life was not a super genius. Mori is the person who in the Port Mafia who has the most in common with Dazai seeing people as mere tools to move according to his wants, and even attempting to mentor Dazai to do the same. It’s Oda, who is not a genius. Rather, Dazai sees Oda as a good person, something he can never see himself as being.

That’s what Dazai’s lesson in “Dark Era” is. There is no magical components inside of you that makes you a good person. From the way Dazai talks he’s already aware at least what the right thing to do, he just doesn’t do it at the time. The thing is Oda wasn’t born a good person. He just decided to become one in his own way one day. He had the freedom to choose that and define himself. Dazai is so scared of what a bad person he is, he lacks the self reflection to try to define himself and keeps his internal workings a mystery probably even to himself.

Oda was Dazai’s friend and equal, even though he was not a super genius like Fyodor or a cunning manipulator like Mori, because he saw and treated Dazai consistently like a human being. That was the only great secret to the mystery that is Osamu Dazai. The mystery is that there’s not much of a mystery at all, Dazai just fools you into believing that he’s an unreadable ghost because he does not want other people, or more likely himself to understand his own actions. He is a paradox, smarter than everyone around him, and yet deeply insecure and finding himself inferior to all other human beings and their values of righteousness. This is why Dazai’s other biggest foil besides Chuuya is Kunikida, someone who strives for the ideal while Dazai is someone who falls far below the ideal. But those ideals in the first place, are just human concepts that were thought up by human beings, not natural things they were born with.

As smart as he is, Dazai doesn’t get that. He doesn’t understand that the things that sabotage him from righteousness are not supposed inhuman flaws and qualities that he has. Rather, because of his painfully human flaws, his insecurities towards others, his inability to connect, him being trapped inside of his own head, and only perceiving things from his own point of view. Dazai is clearly not intended to be a psychopath, he has emotions as he was clearly distraught by Oda’s death, he clearly has the ability to make connections to other people and values those connections to the point where he’s clearly trying to improve how he treats Atsushi vs how he treated Akutagawa. “I’m hated by righteousness”, and “I’m a bad person” him being an inhuman, unfeeling demon is just Dazai’s own personal narrative to stop him from confronting the weakness of his own character.

The joke of No Longer Human is that Yozo while not seeing himself as a human being, is tripped up by what are very obviously human qualities, his anxiety towards other people, his need to be loved, his fear or rejection causing him to hide his true self. Dazai Osamu is as human as everybody else, but he denies his own humanity, thus he is the human failure, thus he is disqualified from being a human being, thus he is no longer human.

2. On Chuuya and Human Beings

Unlike Dazai, Chuuya has far more of a claim to not being a human being. After all, he literally sees himself as an empty body possessed by Arahabaki who is a weird extra dimensional being.

Chuuya is Dazai’s inverse, rather than someone who actively and habitually avoids his own humanity, Chuuya is desperate to learn about his origins. He wants to fill in the darkness and the gaps in himself, whereas Dazai would rather leave things in the dark.

The irony of course being that Chuuya, even though he has some kind of unknowable void inside of him and his origins are completely a mystery even to him, to the point where he does not know if he was a corpse that was resurrected, a child that was possessed after being used by experiments, and if his current identity is his own, if there are vestiges of his old identity, if he’s entirely arahabaki, or a fusion of the two. Chuuya’s origin is confusing even to him, and this is entirely on purpose. Unlike Dazai who avoids confronting his true nature nature, Chuuya’s true nature is unknowable even when he searches for it. The irony being, that even though one could make the argument that Chuuya is genuinely an inhuman entity, that Chuuya is much more human on the surface than Dazai and gets along with other human beings better than Dazai ever could.

Unlike Dazai who can predict people so far in advance that he does not ned to trust others, and therefore often makes decisions for them, or withholds information until the last moment and infleunces them into making the choice he wants to make, Chuuya is someone who fundamentally trusts others. Even down to his ability “Tainted” using it requires him to trust the fact that Dazai who he supposedly hates and who hates him in return will be there to stop it.

If “isolation” is a central theme to Dazai’s character, then “Trust” and “Loyalty” are what is most important to Chuuya. His entire identity revolves around them. This is also specifically from his origins, Chuuya had nothing, no place of belonging, no memories of the past, just an unfathomable black void in his mind when he was found. That is why he relies on the others around him entirely to give him any sense of identity.

If Dazai’s inability to trust is a flaw. If he cannot see righteousness, trust, or loyalty, because he sees through people too well to believe in those ideals and only sees them as hypocrisy. Then, Chuuya’s flaw is that he trusts too much. That he believes in trust and loyalty to the people around him to the point that he lets them use him. Dazai was only able to find his identity after leaving the mafia, but Chuuya’s identity is so tied up in the mafia, that he could never leave, or never doubt someone like Mori the way Dazai does.

It’s apparent in his relationship with the Sheep in “Fifteen.”

The Sheep insist that Chuuya is obligated to fight for them because he has a strong ability, despite the fact that he’s the leader they almost never listen to him even when he only has their best interest in mind.

Dazai tells him he “acts like a sheep in the eyes of wolfs.” If Dazai is someone who considers himself an outside, like a shepard who can never truly belong in the herd but can guide them in their best interest. Then Chuuya sees himself as a wolf pretending to be a sheep. Not with the intent of eating them, but because he desperately wants to be recognized as a part of the herd. Unlike Dazai Chuuya is much more open about his want to have a sense of belonging with other people. However, instead of being accepted he had the opposite result. Chuuya was a sheep all along, and the others were like wolves deceiving him only to prey on him and take advantage of him. Chuuya had no family or relatives, and he still sees the sheep as better than him for accepting him despite him knowing nothing about himself. He sees himself as someone lower than them because of that inhuman part of his character and the things he does not know about himself. The truth is though, that Chuuya is just another sheep and Dazai can see it as plain as day.

His want to be accepted, his want to have a place of belongings, his want to have a personality, mind, values, the way he takes his identity from others around him, those are all human traits. Dazai sees this, especially since these are desires that Dazai deliberately avoids and denies himself.

Chuuya as a peson is someone who is desperately seeking answers for himself. However, he does not believe he has those answers inside of himself. He sees himself as someone who is unnatural, and therefore far inferior to the other human beings around him. Therefore he relies on the guidance of “human beings”. Which is his exact flaw that always results in him being loyal to the wrong people.

Mori is a bad person, but he also gave Chuuya the answers that Chuuya needed the most, when he needed them the most.

Chuuya believes there is something missing inside of himself, and his loyalty to the port mafia, and the others is something that can fulfill that missing thing, but he’s wrong and such blind loyalty only results in him getting used repeatedly. As he sees himself as an inhuman tool in the first place, he thinks he can be fulfilled by finding someone to use him the right way.

3. Dazai and Chuuya’s Relationship

So, Dazai and Chuuya deep inside of themselves both want the same thing. They both want to find their place among human beings. They go about it in opposite ways. Dazai ran away from the mafia and chose the path of saving people. Chuuya stayed with the mafia and chose the path of loyalty to find a place of belonging.

I don’t write meta to declare characters good or bad people, but Dazai is kind of a jerk. He’s manipulative and does not see other people as individuals but rather pieces he can move around to get what he wants, and yet he is on the side of saving people. Chuuya sees other human beings as individuals and he sees himself as the tool. He is generally much more concerned about the welfare of individual people. He is capable of trusting others. He is concerned for Akutagawa’s well being and treats him much better than Dazai ever did. He fights to protect his friends, and values life a whole lot more. Yet, at the same time he’s on the side of the Port Mafia, he’s on the side of killing people for the mafia.

One of Chuuya’s major weaknesses is he only tends to see those he’s loyal to, and the friends around him as human beings. Even though he’s much better at making those friendships and connections than Dazai ever is. Despite respecting other people, he is also much more willing to be cutthroat and kill those he considers in the “outside group” in order to protect those within his group.

Ironically Chuuya’s behavior is exactly what Fyodor refers to as a “Sinfully stupid” human choice to make, because knowing he’s being manipulated he still chooses to kill the other organization head because it is his best bet to save the people he’s loyal to.

This is why we see Chuuya and Dazai in such opposite positions. Chuuya’s behavior just comes off as a lot more human than Dazai’s does. He genuinely believes in the human values that Dazai rejects. It’s most apparent in their relationship with Mori.

Dazai is someone who despite seeming like the same type of person as Mori, someone who only sees other people as tools to use for their own purposes sees through Mori. He knows the parts of Mori are selfish and only acting on his own desires rather than making decisions for the good of the organization as he claims.

Chuuya is someone who genuinely belives in Mori and follows his guidance. Chuuya and Dazai are such opposites that they even both reacted to their mentors in opposite ways. Chuuya someone mentored by Ozaki Koyo who despite all of her flaws sees her subordinates as human beings. She even eventually aids in Kyouka’s escape from the mafia once she realized she would be better off that way, and only tried to stop her from leaving because she believed Kyouka would hurt herself trying to escape to the light and failing the same way Koyo did in the past.

Chuuya while he does show a lot of infleunce from Koyo, he does treat everyone underneath him as human beings, he takes care of those people like they were his own, at the same time takes the opposite path as her. Chuuya has never once tried to leave the mafia and is uninterested in it. Part of him even loathes Dazai for leaving the mafia because it’s a betrayal against loyalty, which is the most important quality for Chuuya. At the same time unlike Koyo who once tried to escape the mafia, Chuuya believes that he, Akutagawa, everyone elseare better off in the mafia. He accepts the mafia because it gives guidance to the blank stretch of void that is his own life.

Dazai on the other hand, who Mori chose due to their similarities, and tried to manipulate by giving him a purpose and meaning to his life (the exact thing that Chuuya lets himself become a tool in order to have), ends up also choosing the opposite path of his mentor. Mori claims that he became the head of the Port Mafia for the sake of the city. Dazai however, leaves the Port Mafia fo his own personal development, so he can become a better person. The mafia’s values of loyalty, or their roles as the watchers of the night and the controllers of the dark side of the city mean almost nothing to him. Dazai sees through Mori. He refused to let himself be shaped into the right hand that Mori wanted him to become.

We also see a reversal of their situations. Dazai is now fighting to protect a small group of close allies in his organization, even though he manipulates them and orchestrates things in order to protect them. Chuuya is now practically Mori’s right hand man. To the point where he took over command of the mafia when Mori was put out of commission, and everyone accepted his temporary leadership. He took the place that Dazai was originally meant to occupy.

So their rivalry may just originate from the fact that they’ve chosen to take such opposite paths in life, that each one of them think is the absolute wrong path. Dazai thinks Chuuya’s value of loyalty and trust is just something that gets him used. Chuua thinks Dazai doesn’t have any trust and loyalty inside of himself at all.

Their ways of thinking are also opposites. Dazai meticulously reads and analyzes everybody else around him, but he’s very untrusting of himself and lacks self reflection. Chuuya’s style of decision making and deduction requires him to trust in his own gut instinct and follow that through. Chuuya is someone very much aware of what his own values are, and what his thoughts ar, and follows those.

Chuuya seeks himself. Dazai denies himself.

The most frustrating part of all probably to each of them is that they do not want to acknowledge each other, they do not want to see the other as a human being.

Part of Dazai’s conflict regarding Chuuya is probably jealousy. Chuuya despite being you know, pat god void monster whatever, is just a lot more normal than Dazai. He got along with other teenagers his own age. He shows no interest in death or dying. He acts like a normal teenager, bratty, rude, obsessed with looking cool. He is able to be normal in ways that Dazai isn’t, and therefore he is more qualified as a human being.

Whereas Dazai acts in a way that Chuuya is afraid of. Chuuya fears his own inhumanity, that his body does not really belong to him and he’s merely just possessing it. He fears that he’s empty on the inside and the way Dazai acts to him is how he assumes an empty person like him would act if he were not trying his best to belong among other human beings.

That is why both of them actively seek to dehumanize each other. Chuuya just wants to see Dazai as a suicide maniac who wants to kill himself for no reason. It’s easier to see him as someone who just wants to die rather than understanding his motivations for why.

However, against his wishes Chuuya ends up coming to understand Dazai. Once he understands that Dazai is a person with his own motivations, it’s impossible to look away from him the way he previously did.

The same for Dazai, he wanted to reduce Chuua to being a dog. He wanted to deny Chuuya his own humanity, and make it easier for him to control. However, in the end Chuuya always refuses to be his dog. Chuuya is someone who asserts his own humanity to Dazai at every step of the way in a way that Dazai cannot deny. He won’t let Dazai see him as anything other than a human being. While older Dazai may be more mature and does not want to completely control other people the same way fifteen year old Dazai did, the fact that Chuuya is so undeniably his own person in a way that Dazai struggles with seeing other people as people is probably still something that irks him.

In the end, Chuuya and Dazai despise each other because they understand each other. They hate each other because they can’t hate each other. They see themselves as inhuman monsters, but they see the others weaknesses so well that the other is undeniably human in their eyes.

Dazai and Chuuya are both people trying to find meaning to their existence as human beings, and trying to know themselves. However, as Rimbaud already pointed out both of their desires are equally futile because there was no meaning in the first place. Nobody finds meaning in their existence. Everyone, all creatures, live without knowing who they truly are the same way Chuuya and Dazai do.

Rather than trying to find meaning in their own existence that they are never going to find, what both of them need to do is find acceptance of that fact. They are human beings, precisely because the two of them are such human failures.

#dazai osamu #osamu dazai #bsd meta #bungo stray dogs meta #bungo stray dogs theory #chuuya meta #dazai meta #chuuya nakahara #nakahara chuuya #meta

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dragonrajafanfiction · 4 years

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Dragon Dancer III: The Golden Apple

To record the conversation between Herzog and Tachibana, no device could be in the building without being discovered by these experienced conspirators. Fingel suggested an external laser tap to measure the vibration of voices against the window glass. A computer would reverse engineer those vibrations back into voices.

Fingel would need to be outside the tower, very high up. It was Lu who suggested he use a drone capable of carrying his weight.. Heavy rain was forecast. The rain and clouds would conceal it.

Next was the question of entry and exit to get to them. There were only two ways into the building, an elevator and a metal fireproof stairwell. Both would be well cleared and blocked off by Tachibana.

"Can Fingel get photos of the inside?" I asked.

"Oh absolutely!" Fingel gave a thumbs up.

"Then that's all we'll need. So long as I can see where I'm going I can go there."

"Won't you be at the lab?" Nono asked.

I looked at her. "Remember what I said at the Mambo cafe? I can move both through time and space."

Nono gasped. "You… plan on being in both places?"

"If I have to. Is there a clock in Tokyo tower?" I asked

"There is!"

"Fingel, be sure the photos you send me as coordinates include it."

Ruri eyes squinted shut with glee. "This is turning out better than even I imagined!" He sobered again. "I don't believe Johann Chu or Nono are capable of taking down the King. Your job is simply to corner him and control the surrounding areas. In fact, I believe you are very well suited to the job of overwatch Lu Mingfei."

"It is my typical job at this point." He sighed, resting his chin in his hand.

Ruri then turned to me. “I’ve been very interested in speaking with you, Carli.”

I smiled and sighed to myself. “Yeah…”

“You’ve been an obsession for both Herzog and Tachibana for a long time seemingly without reason. Even though Cassell has monitored Japan for a long time, it wasn’t until your arrival that things finally began to unravel.”

Ruri’s voice turned wistful. “And now you speak to me of being sold… because you’re an emperor hybrid.”

“It reminds me of those ancient Greek legends where they throw golden apples on the field to start wars.” I said.

He chuckled. “I couldn’t have said it any better myself. You are indeed a beautiful golden apple. Fiercely desired by all.”

Negative emotions welled up in me. Starting with Anjou, then Caesar, then the Comemnus Corporation, the Devil clan, and Hydra… who would be next? This constant pursuit made me want to end my life, to hide in the sweet embrace of death, away from their grasping hands. “What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“You should keep doing what you are already doing. Using it to your advantage.”

I couldn’t help but pull a sneer. “Bait?”

The smile Ruri gave me was absolutely chilling. I leaned away, remembering that I was the same age as some of his victims.

“I don't have any pictures of the facility. But I do have the address. The lab looks like a dental office from the outside but there's a side door that leads to a staircase. I can give you the access code. Just… " He paused. "Be prepared to destroy whatever you find down there."

He returned his gaze to Lu Mingfei. “The King called Masamune Tachibana shortly after Erii’s arrival back at the Hydra headquarters. Why do you think that is?”

Lu looked up at him, a little surprised he knew that.

“For many years, he has kept her alive at the expense of everyone around him. You were quite close to her. Do you know why?”

I glanced at Johann, but his expression was unreadable. “I just assumed he loved his daughter.” I said.

Johann’s eyes narrowed slightly and then he let out an amused sigh.

Lu looked at me. “Tachibana is a jerk. He uses her. But Herzog contacted him after her return, not the other way around. It can’t be good.”

“The sooner this is all over, the sooner we all can be free. Let’s keep that in mind.” Ruri put away the schematics and the recording device.

Johann took my hand. “We should rest. The night will be long. Especially you, Carli. You’ve been passing too many sleepless nights.” Johann helped me off the stool. I looked out the door. The morning light had intensified.

I blinked.

I had forgotten it was daytime.

I took a pill and slept through the day, dreamless. The mission was not to begin until 10 pm, but my part of it would start only after we were certain of the King’s preoccupation with the meeting. I would listen in remotely.

I sat underneath a bus station across the street from the dental office. “Come in, Come in” It was Ruri’s voice. “Report your locations.”

“This is Carli. At the lab.” I answer. “It’s quiet here. Not much activity.”

“It’s an older part of town. Not many people live here outside retirees. A perfect place for someone who’s lived as long as him to conduct his research. They ask few questions now that they’re waiting around to die.”

“Are you always this melancholy?”

“Life has made me quite bitter, yes.”

Fingel cut in. “This is all very lovely and tragic. I’m miles off the ground in the cold and rain and I’m miserable enough already! Can you please SHUT UP?!”

“Where are you anyway?” Lu asked.

Fingel continued his rant. “I’m 60 meters from the window. Wanna come say hi? I’m just hoping I don’t fall to my death here because I’ve never flown on a drone!”

Johann answered. “Meixiu, I will send you a photo of the price time you need to come get us at our location when we’re ready to act.”

My phone dinged. It was a sample photo. He’d taken a digital alarm clock from the hotel to set it up from their hiding spot outside the tower. “Clever!”

“Quiet all lines! Vehicles are approaching the tower!”

That was my cue. I stood up from the bus station, put my hoodie up over my head and walked to the side of the dental office. The key lock readily opened after I put in the access code and sure enough, a dimly lit stairwell led down. I propped the door open and took quiet steps down.

Another heavy door opened into a room. I paused. “Do you see Herzog?”

“It’s only Tachibana for now.” I held back form the door, waiting for confirmation that Herzog had indeed left this lab.

“The lights all went out? It’s a black out!” Chu hissed.

“The whole area is dark. Stand by.” Ruri said calmly.

“That’s the voice of Herzog! He’s here!”

I smiled and nodded and opened the door to the lab. The room lights came on automatically over two rows of incubators lining either wall. Even though Herzog had only purchased five of my eggs, there were at least a dozen babies here!

My cellphone vibrated and I received a video call. But instead of Fingel, it’s a live feed of the Tokyo Tower observation deck!

“You’re welcoooome.” He said smugly.

The audio was amazing given it was only transmitted via laser measured vibrations on the glass. Herzog was sitting at the piano, tinkering lightly on the keys. “If you’re concerned about security, there’s a scanner on the table. Take it and sweep the entire place. There’s no surveillance. We are truly alone.”

Tachibana glanced around. “I trust you have already made that certain. I don’t want to waste precious time.” The elderly man approached him. “Are you still set on world domination? Even after all these years? I’ll say, time has not had any mercy on your body.”

Herzog stood up, his body shimmering. “Does this appearance seem more pleasing to you, dear friend?” His body is changing into a different form, familiar to me.

Before I could stop myself, I said. “The man... with the badges.”

“What’s that?” Nono asked.

“A long time ago, this man approached Isaac’s grandparents to invest in their company to manufacture the dragonsblood serum. His grandfather ended up turning into a servitor because of it.”

The fire stoked in my chest. “They had a little girl. The servitor killed her. Her name was Charlotte… I… ...I was given her name.”

My head was starting to burn now. I took a deeper breath and slowly let it out. Did the Matriarch at Comemnus Corp know that this would happen? Did she know that I would end up here, to take revenge for her daughter’s death? Is that why she named me this? How could that be possible? Was it just coincidence?

Johann. “The audio Ruri gave us mentioned they met twenty one years ago. Does that sound like the same time?”

“No, He would have made the deal with Comemnus before he met Tachibana.”

“I see.”

Mingfei. “Carli… how do you know this?”

Nono shut down the conversation. “Clear comms.”

Herzog chuckled. “We are the ultimate liars and schemers, you know that! How could two devils like us have the gall to ask for salvation?”

Tachibana nodded in agreement. “Yes, you are right. After the myriad of sins I have committed, how could I possibly count on God’s mercy… tell me about your bargain.”

Herzog obliged. “I know Hydra has also been looking for a way to use the blood of the Light King to make the perfect evolution elixir and you’ve found several keys toward that end… but … you still need your teacher’s help.” The spoken smile, smug in its delivery, was apparent despite the mask over his face.

Tachibana didn’t react to it. “You believe that my only goal is to get rid of you in order to rule the world alone? And now that the god is to be awakened, I’m forced to share my throne with you?”

Herzog laughed, shaking his head in dismay. “I know all too well what you’re truly capable of.”

He gestured broadly. “You have controlled the Hydra, your son is soon to be named high patriarch of this Mafia, your mute daughter has the power to destroy the world! For decades, you’ve done everything you could toward your ends. You’ve twisted the intentions of your colleagues, even fooling Cassell elites into murdering the members of the Devil Clan, most of which you created.” He continues to laugh. “You even convinced your son that ordering the execution and destruction of that girl’s family was the way of justice. Just who is the biggest devil here?”

My phone clattered against the tile floor. Fire raged from my chest to my head.

Johann. “Carli… Carli come in.”

My voice is a bitter whisper. “Everything… Everything I’ve suffered… it’s because of them.”

I looked up at the rows of children lining the walls and I finally understood what Chisei was trying to tell me. Human kindness dictated that a child’s life was sacred, beyond sacred. That these innocent souls had to be guarded at all costs. But the root of their existence could no longer be ignored. They weren’t born because I loved Ruri or Chisei. They were here because that man had created them with a sinister purpose.

My mind flashed back to India, snuggling with Johann. I told him my father was a dragon, that my father had saved my life. “Why?” He asked me, terrified. “What does he want from you? Why does he want to save you?”

I said because he was my father.

“No,” He’d told me. “That was the reason he gave you to fool you.”

“Why am I here... why am I here?” I whispered. “Why am I here?”

“Carli? Carli! Are you alright?” Johann asked me. I’d forgotten my comms were on.

Herzog grew more passionate as he spoke. “To bring back to life the Light King! Only then can we extract her fresh blood. This is the only thing that can evolve a human into a pure blood dragon! But I need all the keys to open the Forbidden Gate. I know that you possess some of them and you know that I possess the remaining others, save one.” He chuckled. “But I believe she will come to me soon.”

“And who gets the elixir?” Tachibana asked, unmoved by the theatrics.

“Equal distribution. One gets the pill, the other gets the world.” He paused. “This daughter of yours, with this treatment, would evolve into a pure dragon. But she will still be your daughter. The same lovely person as before, extending her life greatly..”

Lu Mingfei. “Erii? Turn Erii into a dragon?”

“You really think I would do that to my daughter?” Tachibana asks.

“Of course! She’s a devoted child. She would destroy the world for you. This is why you brought her up isn’t it? To have a dragon at your disposal? The ultimate weapon?”

Tachibana folded his hands behind his back. “Then both you and she would be pureblood dragons. Is that your intention?”

My stomach was roiling. I couldn’t see this situation through human eyes any more. These weren’t just babies. These were lab rats. They were tools. He would take them and turn them into dragons, just like Erii.

“You never had any children… did you?” Tachibana asks, head bowed.

“Silly question. I have no need for petty things like that. In addition, ordinary women do not appeal to me. But your daughter is no ordinary woman. Of 100,000 humans given dragon blood directly, only one can survive. But your daughter has proven herself to be that one.” Herzog’s voice takes on the pleasant tone. “To have her destroy the world at my side would be a genuine pleasure.”

“So you’re going to give it to her. Not to Chime? You raised him as a son.” Tachibana says.

Herzog snorted. “I cannot give the pill to Chime. I can’t trust him to do what’s necessary. Even as he eats at my table, his heart is far removed from my goals.”

“Then, it seems then we have a deal. But you’re not afraid I will betray you?” Tachibana says.

“What king would be foolish enough to assume otherwise? We will battle to be the one on the throne, Tachibana, sooner or later.”

I looked on the rows of incubators. Within one, a soft, tiny hand reached up towards the sky. Is this my purpose? Is this why a dragon kept me alive? To take over the world?

I picked my phone up off the floor. I found the picture of Erii’s room and texted Chisei Gen.

“You were right. I should have listened to you.”

“Where are you?” Came the reply.

“I’m next to what might be our children. Or might not be. There are so many of them. Herzog isn’t going to turn them into super hybrids. He’s going to turn them into dragons! I can’t save all of them. Thank you for being patient.”

“Don’t worry. I will kill Herzog in a moment. Wait for me.”

I gasped. “Chisei is!”

My comms came alive. “What’s he doing here?!” Nono hissed.

“Brother!” cried Ruri. His voice was the cry of fear and worry, not of anger. “Don’t let him get in! He’ll die!”

“Carli! It’s time for you to move! We attack the king now!”

“I’m on my way.” I took one more look at the rows of children. I wanted so much to save them, but would it just lead to more suffering? For me? For them? Would it be the first step toward a world full of dragons?

Johann’s photo of their location appeared on my phone. I could teleport there, the time stamp was there.

I approached the first child. They were only identified by numbers. Which one was Chisei’s? Did it even matter? “I can’t... I can’t make these kind of decisions!”

I was only human. A human with human feelings and human thoughts. What would a dragon do? A dragon doesn’t feel these things. They’ll gladly eat their own family if it benefited them.

I let my dragonblood rise in my eyes, blinking in the dim light that became bright as daylight. I felt my pupils constrict. Immediately, my emotions dampened. The calculation was simple. There were only three bloodlines fit for me.

At the top of the list, Lu Mingfei towered. Second, was Chisei Gen. Third was Chu Zihang. All others were unworthy. When I looked upon the children, I felt a deep offense. None of them. None of them were the worthy ones. These children had a twisted blood.

Herzog’s. He said he didn’t have children. He lied. His dragon mind simply didn’t view them as such.

Likewise, the light spear appeared in my hand. What had been very difficult for Carli to do was a simple thing for Ouroboros.

#Johann Chu #Lu Mingfei #Nono #Chisei Gen #Ruri Kazama #Fingel Von Frings

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silvensei · 4 years

Text

In This Mad Machinery

A human and an android swap bodies, resulting in identity crises, existentialism, philosophy with the boys, and fun!

Detroit: Become Human | gen | 20k | rated T | introspective comedy/sci-fi

Chapter 4 (2k words) | [AO3 link] | [first] | < prev | next >

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“And you’re sure Markus will be okay with…y’know, all this? Like it won’t freak him out if I just walk up to him as not you?”

“He is a leader for a reason: he’s reasonable.”

“Mm. Good reason.”

“Just explain it to him from the beginning. Offer to share the day’s memories if that’ll be easier—oh!” Connor shifted in the driver’s seat to fully face his partner and held up a hand. “Not a memory transfer! That’s a different process altogether. That’s what we did to switch. Markus technically is part of the same prototype series as me, so it might prompt for a complete memory transfer—don’t do that one!”

“I got it, Mom: Don’t accidentally kill myself.” Hank shut the door, leaning his forearms on the open window. “As for you, just lay low. You can tell Jeffrey that you’re you if you want, he’s probably heard worse from me before, but maybe don’t let it get out into the whole precinct. Not only would CyberLife get snippy about their secret plans leaking too much, but can you imagine the hell Gavin would raise? Christ.”

Connor paused. “I’m not sure if I can, but I’m sure he would be troublesome.”

Hank laughed. He had heard Connor laugh before, on very rare occasions, but he didn’t think it ever sounded this relaxed and easy. It really gave his rough voice an amicable quality. “Swing back here when you’re done? Or call if it’s more than an hour?”

“Can do, Lieutenant.”

He stepped away from the car as Connor shifted out of park. “Careful with the wheels,” he called before starting down the driveway toward the Manfred house.

In the corner of his vision, the external temperature reading increased to 67.7°F (19.8°C). Focusing on the readout expanded the widget: RH 58.1%, Precip. 12%, Wind 3 mph NW, Sunset 8:52 PM, Moon Phase—

He looked away. It was still there—being a heads-up display and all—but the gesture dismissed the weather. Who could possibly need that much information. No one. It’s been bombarding him from all sides with random facts and figures and updates ever since he woke up like this a couple hours ago (2 hr 32 m 57 s). No wonder Connor was such a know-it-all: his programming forced him to be. Hank slowed his stroll. What was Connor going through right now, free of his encyclopedia of trivia for the first time in his life? Hopefully not lost and unsure and uninformed. God, he hoped not.

He shook his head, quite literally to get his damn android brain to stop calculating the chances that his best friend was having an identity crisis or existential crisis or any number of other crises. Instead he thought about how his shoulders didn’t ache when he did that. His knees didn’t have that familiar creaking he’d grown so accustomed to, either. In fact, besides the pressure on the soles of his feet to keep him grounded and the near-imperceptible brush of fabric and sunlight against his skin, he didn’t feel much of anything. Thinking about his current body only brought up biocomponent specs and functionality reports (100% - Fully functional).

“Fucking-A…,” Hank muttered, noting once again he didn’t sound like himself. Being stuck in an android could be likened to sensory deprivation and informational oversaturation at the same time. If he dwelled on it too long, it’d drive him insane.

Something pinged him as he approached the door, and the door clicked open. “Welcome, RK800.”

Hank stepped into the foyer, marveling at its grandeur. It was a veritable mansion when compared with his single-story shack. It probably was a mansion. He wondered if Sumo would like living here, with the marble and the high ceilings. Maybe in the summer. The stone would keep him nice and cool. Air probably circulated well in here, too. Although the zebra rug didn’t look terribly comfortable

The double doors across from him slid open. Strolling in in an asymmetrical tee and jeans, Markus slipped a paint brush into the pocket of the smock tied at his waist. “Connor!” he called with a grin, wiping off some paint from his hands. “I thought you’d never take up my offer to stop on by!”

Hank returned the grin. He’d have to pass that comment on to Connor. “Hey, Markus.”

The android caught him in a brief hug before stepping back. “So what’s up? Care for a painting lesson?”

“Thanks, but not right now. Just have some…neat info we thought you would enjoy.”

“Oh, really?” He crossed his arms. “‘We’ as in you and the lieutenant? Isn’t sharing DPD intel kind of illegal?”

“Not exactly. I mean, yeah, but it’s not DPD.” Hank took a breath (UNNECESSARY; temperature nominal) and rocked on his feet. “We got an email from CyberLife this morning about some quack idea to define sentience. They wanted to see what would happen if they threw souls around, human and android alike.”

Markus scoffed. “Sounds a bit pompous. What makes them think they can even do that?”

Hank cocked his head and held open his arms. “They already have.”

Markus raised an eyebrow. He shifted his weight, looking the other over. “Connor…?” he asked slowly.

“Not at the moment. Hank Anderson.”

A half smile completed the look of surprise. “A human in an android body? And Connor is…?”

“Heading to the precinct. They called me in for something and he’s, well, me for the day.”

“Huh. You’re right, this is interesting. Temporary?”

“Yeah—here, Connor suggested I just…show you his memory—our memory—of today.”

“Sure, yeah.” Markus held out his hand. At Hank’s hesitation, he finally let out the chuckle he was holding back. “If you can figure out how to do it, that is?”

“Great, another snarky robot on my hands,” Hank grumbled, grabbing his hand. Markus caught another laugh and shifted his grip to his forearm instead. Their skin shied away from their touch, and the connection pinged his system. [RK200 #684 842 971] connected.

File copy requested: [Visuals; Audio] {-04:00:00.0}:{00:00.0}

Accept Deny

The notification took up his vision in an instant. It didn’t say anything about a memory transfer like Connor warned, so he figured it would do. Just thinking about accepting the prompt completed the request, and the past four hours from his chassis’ perspective played back at breakneck speed. From Connor petting Sumo and reading a book exactly four hours ago to Hank’s latest quip, it all sped by, too fast to comprehend and yet with every detail intact and evident. He reeled, flinging his arm back.

He blinked rapidly. The only sign of the event was the text (Copy complete) fading from his vision. Markus, on the other hand, dropped his hand to his hip, unfazed. “Mimicking a nexus connection by adjusting and enhancing the brain’s natural electric field to induce a complete data transfer,” he mused. “That is genius! It doesn’t prove anything spiritual, that’ll require much more philosophical debate into the depth and scope of AI, but it certainly doesn’t disprove anything either.”

“How can you understand all that so fast?” Hank asked candidly.

Markus smiled. “Years of practice.” He untied his smock and beckoned him towards the door. “Why don’t we continue this in the den?”

The doors slid open into an absolutely spacious sitting room. As if the zebra pelt on the foyer floor wasn’t excessively extravagant enough, the first thing Hank saw was a giraffe in the corner, probably real, definitely stuffed. (Analysis: TAXIDERMY, est 16yr) He had to stop from rolling his eyes at its ostentatiousness. “Ritzy place ya got here,” he commented, hoping Connor’s voice defaulted to conversationally neutral.

“Yes. Carl doesn’t particularly like it either.” Damn. “However, the media seems to dote on and worry about an elderly millionaire more when they live a modest, humble life than when they look the part.” He gestured to one of the couches in the center of the room. “Please.”

“Y’know, based on news reports and the whole ‘led a revolution’ thing, you’re not exactly what I expected.” The couches were bright cherry red, fitting the theme of the room. He sank into the one closer to the door.

Markus sat across from him, crossing his legs. “Even celebrities need days off,” he pointed out. “I used to be a caretaker. That doesn’t define me anymore, and Carl has a new full-time caretaker anyway, but I still like to come check on him when I can. Get free painting tips while I’m here. But enough about me.” He folded his hands in his lap. “I’m dying to know what your day’s been like.”

“Playing shrink now? What about, just…general exposition?”

“Anything! This is unprecedented!” His eyes shone. Connor was 100% correct that Markus would be ecstatic. “All of our efforts these past months have been towards helping mankind understand androids as people, and now here you are, literally seeing things from our point of view! Walk a mile in the other’s shoes, as the proverb goes.”

“Okay….” Hank drummed his hands on his legs. His first instinct was to think back through the day, but the thought triggered another rapid memory replay. He stopped it and groaned. “It’s fuckin’ fast,” he said. “There’s a shit ton of information even without the router in my head. With it, it’s like I’m every computer at once.”

“That’s an interesting interpretation of it. Maybe a bit of an overstatement.”

He scoffed. “This android brain has involuntarily subjected me to more math in the last three hours than I have had to do in the last thirty years. Like, I don’t need a speedometer at all times, or news updates from Ghana, or access to all the fuckin’ bad memes of my youth. It’s excessive! Maybe not to you,” he added, holding out a hand, “but you’ve grown up with it…figuratively speaking.”

“That’s true.” Markus propped his chin in his palm. “I guess I’d be able to relate more to Connor’s side. I wonder how he likes being disconnected from the network.”

“Yeah, I wonder, too….” Hank pursed his lips. “The kid seemed really shaken up as soon as the whole ‘identity’ question came into play. Seemed like he’s been thinking about it for a while, so I figured…a break from the norm might do him some good. Hell, if I’m getting so overwhelmed by android stuff, maybe he’s finally got some underwhelming peace and quiet.”

“Perhaps. I can ask him later, though; you’re here right now. How about…colors? Does the world look any different? Any sharper, mayhap?”

“Bud, this place would look like a Crayola box to anyone.” Hank took a moment to look around, ignoring the scrolling list of crayon names in his periphery. Sure, it was bright and sharp, but he was fifty-three. If he stole literally anyone’s glasses, it’d improve his vision. “Yeah, I guess it’s all in shiny 4K. Look, Markus, I’m not really a conversationalist; words never were my strong point, so I’m not sure how well I can convey this, ah…ongoing out-of-body experience.”

Markus held up his hands in surrender. “Perfectly alright, Lieutenant. With only a few hours of android life, there’s no sense sitting around talking for all of it. Why not look to some action instead?”

“Action? What’s that mean?”

He stood up with a smile. “Have you ever seen The Matrix, Mr. Anderson?”

“Snuck into a theater to see it opening week.” He pushed himself up in suit. His balance had to correct itself when he was on his feet earlier than expected, being lighter, stronger, and without a whisper of joint pain. “And yes, my friends called me that for months after. Why?”

“Well, we could always spar with some newfound kung fu, but painting has always been more my style.”

“What the fuck are you—” He stopped, remembering the scene he was referencing. His computer brain also conveniently played it back for him, too. Thanks, CyberLife. “I can just download painting? Like that?” He snapped.

“The technical skills, yes; the creativity and style, though, you’d still have to practice yourself.” He picked up his smock and held it out. “How about that lesson?”

Hank raised an eyebrow. He had never pictured himself as a painter. Or an artist of any kind. Or an android. He shrugged. “Ah, what the hell. You’re on, Picasso.”

[next >]

#Detroit Become Human #DBH #Hank Anderson #Markus #DBH fanfiction #body swap #my writing #generic tags this time nothing really to add #time is bleeding together and losing meaning in this quarantime

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vampirewithbedsidemanners · 4 years

Text

Out of the Vault: Story Time

STORY TIME This is not a work of fiction. TRIGGER WARNING: ACTIVE SHOOTER/THREAT. If you are sensitive to the topic, dont read. This is something I wrote for myself following a pretty intense situation at work. This was a few years ago but Im leaving out names and places on purpose, still. You hear a lot about active shooters in the media but they rarely cover active shooter threats, which can take a toll as well. I saw a news report once about schools in bad neighborhoods that have regular lock downs because of shootings in the surrounding neighborhoods are giving their students PTSD just trying to protect them. I can see why. I don’t think I have PTSD, but I wont really know until I get another call like this.

I don’t think about it often. Sometimes, in the days after when the rest of the world started forgetting, I would remember it.

But most days, especially now, it was a distant nightmare. I was still a kid at the time, young and naive. I still lived in that bubble of ‘it will never happen to me’. Every close call solidified that bubble. The almost stabbing, the drug busts, the scrappy fist fights that always ended with someone getting snowed, fed the delusion. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I knew that we were short staffed. That I shouldn’t be clearing buildings and parking lots and bathrooms with drug addicts overdosed on the floor, by myself. Most days, I didn’t even notice.

It makes you feel big, even when you’re not. 5′1″, I disappeared behind the desk at the stationary post without even trying. The other guards couldn’t get in the patrol car behind me without moving the seat back. But there was an adrenaline rush to it that made me feel like I could do this, no matter my size. I liked the work, it made me a piece of a larger puzzle.

“You better lock down the hospital, I’m coming to kill you all.”

12 words.

5 minutes before help arrived.

1 other guard.

6 buildings. 23 floors between all of them. 11 elevators. 2 pedways. A tunnel. 17 entrances.

9 parking lots.

43 employees. Roughly 100 patients.

5:30 a.m., all the doors have automatically unlocked.

We had no plan. We had no face to put to the voice. The operator who took the call was doubled over in a corner, crying. The House Supervisor was quiet. My coworker, always confident on the border of cocky, was at a loss for words.

“Do we take this threat serious.” The question hung in the air.

“We have to.” House said. And that was it. The horrible, terrible, unfair truth about threats. Bomb threats. Active Shooter threats. It didn’t matter.

Its real until it’s not.

I used to write about how adrenaline rushes make you numb to the pain. I slammed my hand in the first door, trying to get it to lock. I was at the end of a long hallway, outside the Emergency Room. It was the first external door I passed on the way into the rest of the hospital. I felt the pain in my hand, even though the adrenaline was pumping. My palms were sweaty, and I was out of breath. I had to jump up over and over, swiping at the off button before I could lock the door.

As I ran down the hall towards the surgery area, all I could think was ‘I should have started at the main lobby.’ These long hallways with nowhere to hide would have made me an easy target. One short, out of breath, underpaid and overworked guard with a thousand keys and blood dripping down her hand because she was clumsy and couldn't lock a door, target.

The surgery entrance door stands open when you turn off the box. I didn’t know that at the time. I could feel the seconds ticking by as I struggled with it. In hindsight, I should have just locked the inner door and been done with it. They were glass anyways, and definitely not bullet proof. Anyone who wanted to get in wouldn't have been deterred by glass.

By the time I hit the pedway, I felt sick. It had been 2 minutes since I had started locking down the hospital, something that we had no plan or procedure for. Somewhere between day surgery and the pedway, I started to get tunnel vision. I don’t remember my thought process for calling my husband, and I vaguely recall what I actually said on the voicemail. My words were kind of hard to make out over the sound of me running down a flight of stairs.

‘I love you. I’ll be home late. Don’t freak out, but we have a Code Black at East. I love you.’ It was all I could make out. The first time I listened to it, a few weeks after that day, all I could remember thinking was ‘this could have been the last thing he ever heard from me.’

When I reached the main lobby, I started moving people away from windows and down into hallways. Registration helped some, mostly with moving benches. No one really knew what to do. Someone brought me a printout. Cops had arrived, there was just 2 patrol cars parked outside the Emergency Department. More were coming. They traced the number and got an ID. I was expecting a mugshot, not a military ID. The grainy black and white photo did very little to help with identification. I was looking for a black man, in his early 20’s, of unknown height or weight, neither of which are listed. I stood by the door, vetting everyone that came in. More cops showed up, some in undercover vehicles, some off duty in their own cars. It became harder and harder to tell what was suspicious from what wasn’t. I think by that point, the paranoia had set in. Even if the cops had more info than I did, they would have had just as hard a time picking a non-descript black man out in a crowd.

A man in sweats approached the front door. He had walked past the off-duty cop parked in front. The cop started opening his door to get out, or at least that is what my brain saw. It could have been anything, or nothing. I didn’t know. It was the hoodie that caught me off guard. Baggy clothes conceal everything. His hood was up, hands in his pockets. I couldn’t see his face.

It played out like one of those dreams where you’re cornered and scrambling and trying to get the words out, but you can’t. I was shaking so hard I could barely hold the glass sliding doors as I tried to force them back together. He walked at a normal pace, at ease. There was nothing aside from the clothes and skin color to say that this was the caller, but I was terrified that it was, regardless of the statistics. Looking back, I must have looked like a mess. Here I was, shaky and out of breath, struggling to push together glass doors that didn’t actually lock to stop a potential shooter who would just break them down anyways instead of running away. My voice was gone, as was all the air in my lungs. I’ve seen videos, of cops shooting suspects that were already down because of adrenaline. It gets to be too much, and they start to twitch and accidentally pull the trigger. I imagine, this is what that would feel like. We’re all human, after all.

When he pulled out his hospital badge, I thought I might actually start crying from relief.

It was over in under 10 minutes, but I was still shaky 2 and a half hours later when they found him and I was finally sent home.

People at work said that it wasn’t real, because nothing happened. People, mostly the other guards, who were called in and showed up after the site was swarming with law enforcement. We had half the police force, it seemed like, between the off duty and the incoming shift. State troopers were combing the surrounding interstates. Military police were waiting at the caller’s residency. But there was just the two of us for those first 5 minutes. Before police were there, before we had any answers. We had to pick and choose what entrances to lock because there was no way to lock them all. We ignored entire buildings because there was too much ground to cover. If he had been sitting in his car in the parking lot when he called, it wouldn’t have mattered if the cops were called or the military police involved.

I would have been a target for the uniform I wore. Patients might have been fine. Nurses, too. Doctors maybe. The floors would have gone untouched. But the two of us would have been shot at, even if he didn’t hit either one.

Troopers found the caller overdosed in his car 3 miles from the hospital. He had a gun, but only a handful of bullets. Even if he had shown up, he was too messed up to do anything and would have quickly been taken down. They gave him Narcan, and the Military police took him away. I found out later when I was looking over the list of charges that he had also called the fire department and told them the hospital was on fire and that they needed to evacuate us. Someone said he wanted pain pills and the doctor said no because he was a junkie, but I’m not really sure why he did it. It doesn’t really matter. He was sentenced to 15 years for the civil side of things and court marshaled for conduct by the military. He will spend the better part of the next two decades in a military prison serving two consecutive sentences. 15 years and then another 5 for the military.

The hospital had forgotten by shift change. I had been held over 15 and a half hours because of the lockdown. I would have gotten off at 6 a.m. that morning. When I came in the next night, no one really talked about it. I guess that means I did my job. My debriefing was 10 minutes, and didn’t cover anything, really. The hospital locked down the truth and smoothed things over with the local paper. They didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

We were 3 miles and 5 bullets away from a Code Silver, active shooter.

But nothing happened so it wasn’t real, right?

Tags: @fanfiction-trashpile

#out of the vault #active shooter threat #personal

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annewithagee · 5 years

Text

Let Anne Say (Part III)

Anne Shirley has never be one to throw swearwords around carelessly - but then again, we all slip sometimes.

She just really isn’t sure how to feel about the fact that whenever she does, Gilbert Blythe is there to listen.

Shirbert, Modern AU, dedicated to/blamed on @wilderwestqueen

ff.net / AO3

"A fucking idiot, that's what I am!" she cried out with exasperation, tears still glistening in her grey-green eyes as she glared at her loyal friend, who had been trying so unsuccessfully to comfort her for the past quarter.

Gilbert could do little else than sigh wearily at the performance.

"You know this isn't true, Miss Highest-Score-On-The-Island-Last-Year," he said firmly, rubbing his temples, slowly losing hope that his reasoning could be of any help after all. "You made a mistake, and that's true; it could have been avoided and that is true as well. But for the last time, Anne, it doesn't make you a fool."

"Yes! Yes it does!" she objected instantly. "Oh, don't you understand anything?"

"I understand that you have accidentally put one customer's coffee on another customer's tray and then rushed towards their table with a speed of lighting as soon as you'd realised the mistake. You made it right long before either of those girls realised that there had been any mistake at all, not to mention that even if you hadn't, there would be next to no consequence – except maybe having to remake the order this once. Don't you think that maybe it's time to stop making it sound as if you'd killed someone in cold blood today?"

"You're impossible," Anne exclaimed again, burying her face in her hands, and nearly knocking her own tea with her elbow in the process. Gilbert reached out and moved the mug to a safer position, but said nothing. "And this whole situation is unbelievable. How can you not see that it was absolutely, entirely, doubtlessly my fault, all caused by my own cursed tendency to daydream? And that it shouldn't have been possible to even make such mistake, because the task was so silly, so simple. And goodness, Gil, consequences or not, can't you really see how stupid that makes me feel?"

For a few moments Gilbert did nothing but stared at her, carefully weighing his next words. His arsenal of good reasons was still quite well equipped, even with so many of them already presented to his miserable, slightly hysterical best friend. There were many things he could still tell her, remind her of: how she had been working in that shop for more than a month now and yet, it had been the first time when she'd made such a mistake; how the shop had been at its busiest, with students running in an out, ordering the strangest and most complicated drinks when she eventually had; how she herself had spent most of the preceding night studying, ending up with next to no sleep to keep her going through the day that followed after it.

And yet, knowing Anne Shirley as well as he did, Gilbert realised that none of those arguments would be of any meaning to her. She was too damn stubborn for them to be.

"Is that what you would say to me if the roles were reversed?" he asked suddenly, making her look up at him, surprised with this new approach. "Is that how you'd react if I had come here today and told you that I'd made such a mistake myself?"

Anne's eyes were round with shock when she said, "You know this isn't -"

"You know what, forget that," he interrupted her with a wave of his hand, taking her aback again. "You and I have argued enough times for me to imagine you actually saying something of the sort, so it doesn't really take us anywhere. But Diana? What about her? Would you treat her in the way you're treating yourself now?"

Anne took little time pondering over his question. As soon as she had comprehended the real meaning of it, she snorted impatiently, looking away with a scowl on her already wrinkled forehead.

"Well, first of all, Diana never would have made a mistake so dumb," she answered sharply, turning towards him once more to bestow another glare on his face. "The very notion is absurd, so I really don't think your example is a very good one."

"Alright then," Gilbert didn't give up. "What about Phil?"

"She might do something of this kind, I suppose; but I can hardly imagine her coming here to cry on my shoulder because of that. She's too strong – or too careless – to have a need for that."

"And you're not?"

"No!" Anne's voice was audibly higher this time, as she put down her mug with a clank, only narrowly avoiding spilling the beverage inside it on the table before her. "I'm not like her. I'm not used to people ignoring my mistakes thanks to a sweet smile I give them the next moment. I'm not having fun pretending I'm sillier than I am to appear more innocent or appealing. And I'm definitely not ready to take it calmly that my wit, my only good trait, turns out to be so much weaker that I thought it to be."

Silence fell on the room when she had finished her tirade, or at least this first, angry part of it. Gilbert, who had long ago learnt Anne's habits, knew that there was another part to come, probably even more serious than the one he'd just heard.

As impatient as he was growing, he knew he had to allow her to speak the rest whenever she choose to do so.

He watched her slump wearily and hide her face in her hands, his heart cracking with sorrow that mirrored the one that had so suddenly reflected on her. Careful not to startle her with his movement, he leaned forward and reached his hand to cover her wrist and hopefully drag it away from her face.

"I'm not Phil, Gilbert -" she said weakly a moment later, after she had eventually allowed him to do just that. "and I'm certainly not Diana, either. I'm me. Just me."

A sigh escaped Gilbert's lips, but he didn't let himself forget of the matter at hand. Easing his grasp on Anne's wrist, he slid his hand towards hers and covered it, giving her the little squeeze she undoubtedly needed. She looked up at him then; but it was clear she had no desire to speak anymore.

"Well, first of all, I really don't get that need to add the 'just' before talking about yourself," he said gently. "You're you, that's true; but it doesn't make you any worse than either of your unquestionably fantastic friends. And Anne, your wit really isn't any poorer than you think, as each of your tests and assignments confirms. Not to mention, there really is a lot more to you than your intelligence, you know."

She could hardly bring herself to do more than grumble at him. "Like what?"

"Like that incredible imagination of yours. No, Anne, you don't get to complain about it now, and even less so to blame that cursed coffee shop mistake on it. It is a gift; and like almost everything else, those also tend to be inconvenient at times." He fell silent for a moment, as if weighing his next words, even though he was perfectly sure of what he wanted to say. With a quick glance to her heavy bag that now lay in the corner of her room and the stacks of books that covered more than a few spots in it, he resumed, "You are hard-working and consequent, both in your studies and any other jobs you take upon yourself. You can be determined to the extend no one I know is -"

"I believe you meant to say stubborn, coach Blythe -"

"Even if, then it is in the utterly positive way," he refuted her argument easily, finally letting go of her hand and reaching out for her abandoned mug instead. "It made you catch up and outshine everyone at school and now it's pushing you to do the same here. And yet, even that isn't all. Because you know what else you are, Anne?"

"I can't wait to find out," she muttered under her breath.

"You are kind."

The look she gave him was full of disbelief at first, and was now starting to border with derisiveness as well. It was a look Gilbert had expected; he held it calmly, aware of how much depended on his own show of certainty, of his belief in what he was saying now.

"I'm under a strong impression you no longer know whom you're talking to, Gil," she grumbled eventually, taking her mug from him and resting her lips against its rim. "Either that, or you're just quoting some great motivational speeches without thinking; to be fair, I'd prefer the former to be the case. I would be severely disappointed to find you so utterly unprofessional."

"You can call me whatever you like, Carrots. You know that, unlike some people, I'm immune to name-calling, especially when done by you," he answered her lightly, before saying, "Now if you just let me do what I'm trying to do here, it would be greatly appreciated. Will you?"

"Will I what, exactly?"

"Will you humour me and answer the question I asked you before? About Diana?"

That request earned Gilbert another glare on Anne's part, but she did not protest this time. Swallowing the last of her tea she muttered a quiet "Fine," before she put the mug away and breathed in deeply.

"Okay," she spoke up eventually. "Assuming that by some great disturbance in the Force or another miracle Diana Barry actually managed to mix up her orders and serve the drinks to wrong consumers, and that she would care about such a mishap enough to come to me looking for comfort -"

"You know that she would -"

"In such case, I believe I would tell her to put it behind her and not to worry too much," Anne finished with a roll of her eyes. "I suppose I'd tell her that everyone can make a mistake and that it doesn't make her any less competent, especially as no real harm was done, and that, knowing how well-organised and skilled in the field she is – because honestly, I've never seen a barrister more talented than her – we really must agree that there was some external powers at work for her to make any mistake in the first place."

"Powers like a night spent with Shakespeare?" Gilbert suggested with a smile.

"I was thinking of witches and charms but I guess the Bard is closely enough related to those," Anne admitted with another roll of her big green-grey eyes.

"Good. Now pray tell me: why do those arguments are enough to justify Diana's error but not to justify yours?"

To that Anne had no ready response. She had expected the conversation to head that way, of course; she'd known what Gilbert's plan was all along and could not claim to be surprised by this final question of his.

And yet, she could not answer him, either.

Meanwhile, Gilbert went on. "Why can't you be kind to yourself in the same way you are to her? Why are you so unforgiving towards yourself when we both know how understanding you're always trying to be to everyone around you? They say you can't really go through life happy if you're not your own best friend – so why are you so determined not to be yours?"

For the first time that day Anne laughed quietly with a mischievous sparkle returning to her eyes once more.

"I suppose I'm too spoilt by having you and Diana occupy that post with such fervour," she admitted with a smile at last. "To be fair, I'm not even sure if I could beat you if I tried."

"Well, I dare say Di won't mind stepping down for such a noble cause," came Gilbert's ready answer. "And as much as I hate not coming in first, I certainly am used to you outrunning me by now. So? Do we have a deal, Miss Shirley, or should I really call Diana to support me in that final strive?"

"There's no need for that. At least, that's what my best friend thinks."

#posting this nightmare before i forget again #feeling strange about my writing #fanfiction #writing #anne of green gables #aogg #aogg fic #anne shirley #gilbert blythe #shirbert

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years

Text

Erica Heftmann breaks free from the control of the FFWPU / UC

Dark Side of the Moonies by Erica Heftmann (Penguin Books 1982)

Erica Heftmann was born in Washington, DC, in 1952. She believed she was born again in 1974 to Korean parents — the Lord of the Second Advent, Reverend Moon, and his wife, Hak Ja Han. She was deprogrammed from the Moon cult and became interested in the issue and power of mind control. In the 1980s, because of her research and expertise in that field, she was in demand as an adviser to mental health professionals, clergy, legislators, educators, legal and medical practitioners, law enforcement agencies, mind control victims and their families throughout the world.

Contents

Part I – Heavenly Deception

Part II – Free Will But No Choice

Part III – Return to Reality

Part IV – From the Outside Looking In

1 The Technology of Mind Control 2 Deprogramming Therapy 3 Judiciary, Legislature and the ‘Cryptocracy’ 4 Critical Judgement

Notes

Dark Side of the Moonies is the disturbing account of one person who gave up her own mind, her whole life to a man she thought was the messiah.

Since her liberation from the Moonies, she has come to understand the power that was used to control her. In revealing the hidden life of one cult, Erica Heftmann exposes the startling force cults are exerting in society – and the grip they have on many people.

I was a Moonie. When I regained my mind and could look back at the horror of it, I realized that my freedom was conditional. I was haunted by the need to understand how and why I had been transformed into what I hated most. Now I would be an ex-Moonie. My innocence would never return. … I had to live with the ignorance and prejudice of a public that believes I was somehow pre-disposed to becoming a cult member while they are immune. People think cults are something to laugh at, groups of religious half-wits who would never have made it in life anyway and are better off where they are. I was there … to further incredible schemes of political and economic power.

I am setting out my story and my explanations of it. I do this for the sake of others who have suffered agonies so profound as to make my cult experience seem like a holiday. I wish that I could bring voice to the countless others... I write this for people under mind control, especially those I love who are mentioned in these pages. Do not be afraid to use your own minds; you need no greater masters.

In this era we are learning about the plight of the handicapped, the minorities, those who have been denied the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We must learn about all unfortunates because we are responsible for depriving them by our failure to listen, to understand, to allow them the right to help themselves. Those who are able and refuse to help are the true unfortunates. They do not know how precious life is.

Erica Heftmann 1981

page 1

Part I – Heavenly Deception

On the last day of 1974 I nudged my way through the bustle of downtown Los Angeles with a lot on my mind. It wasn’t only taking inventory of the past year. It was the pattern I saw emerging. Breaking away, testing new ground, retreating. Every path led to the same edge and, feeling I couldn’t make it across, I would go back to find another path. I had come to know the edge pretty well.

I was surprised to hear the stories that circulated about me because I considered my life to be too ordinary. My measuring standards were not set by my peers but by the characters that peopled my books and travels.

Adulthood was edging me away from my mother and an older sister I adored. My father and brother had removed themselves from the family during my late childhood but what was left was stable. Mom was always patient, comforting, totally involved in her two girls.

I had a short romance with formal education. After two terms at university I declared myself graduated, having learned everything I felt the institution had to teach me: how to find a book in the library and how to sit down to coffee with an interesting professor.

With full sails and no rudder, I went to Europe taking every precaution not to be a hippie, annoyed that of all the times I could have been born on this planet I had to co-exist with a counter-culture that popularized doing one’s own thing. I picked my way carefully to avoid the throngs of stereotyped individuals who faced me at every turn. …

My mother was not easy to rebel against because I felt she was usually right. How could I break away and establish my own identity if there was no risk involved? She was always there to fall back on, to soften the blows. … Maybe you’ve been on your own for a few years but the world has just been your playground.

Wait a minute. Don’t be that hard on yourself. Someone puts you on a speck of cosmic dust whirling through space without asking your permission and then just as rudely and abruptly and inevitably takes you away. While you’re here you’re given a set of problems and a set of rules for solving them. Like someone leaving a kid to amuse himself with square pegs and round holes. ’Bye kid, see you in eighty or ninety years. No, Erica, I don’t blame you one bit for stepping back to take a look at it all. People are manipulating and killing each other and for what? Do they even enjoy the spoils of their exploits? Why waste your life trying to set things up for them to destroy when you have enough sense to realize that there’s something else in this existence to do?

Lonely, confused and worried about fulfilling my potential, I had escaped the forced gaiety of the office New Year’s party. Everyone making crass jokes about resolutions and getting drunk to forget them.

On the last working day of the year, all the desk calendars in the office buildings were collected and released into the wind from the roofs. They fluttered down like ticker tape. Now as I walked the last couple of blocks to the bus stop, I stared at them cluttering the pavement. Some pages had little notes jotted on them. OCTOBER 15/meet Dave for lunch. Or 2:00/REGIONAL MEETING. Giving in to a wave of melancholy, I couldn’t help but see the metaphor days lying in the gutter, accumulated so quickly and then forgotten.

A big commuter bus moved away from the kerb and blasted a clump of pages into an open drain with its exhaust. So it’s come to this, has it, I tried joking with myself.

I looked up about the same moment that I felt someone gazing at me. A pair of blue eyes much like my own. A young woman just a few paces away was watching me. She was wholesome looking, rather tall, and had a short, dark-haired young man with her.

In my memory, it is etched that I was the one to start the conversation but I know that this is not the way it happened. There was just something so familiar and so welcoming in her eyes that I felt myself reaching out to make the first move.

All I needed for an introduction was to know that they were foreigners. How well I remembered the feeling of being a newcomer to a city and how comforting it was when strangers had stopped and talked with me.

The girl’s name was Ingrid and she was from Switzerland. The one she towered over was Antonio, a Peruvian. I asked how such an unlikely combination had met They explained that they were touring with an organization called International One World Crusade. This was their last stop in America and within a week they would push on to Japan.

Ingrid had spent all of her time in Los Angeles cooped up in the kitchen cooking for the others. On her first opportunity to get out and see the sights, she was delighted to meet someone. They chatted on. Out of the corner of my eye I was searching for a coffee shop we could dive into. I made the suggestion. It was one of those magical meetings that happens when one travels and I could tell the feelings were shared all around. My bus didn’t stop running for a few hours.

‘We’d love to,’ Ingrid said, ‘But we are just on our way back for an evening meeting. Would you like to walk with us? You could see our headquarters office and meet some of the others.’

Something flickered in me, making me want to bolt, no matter how friendly they were. Something about not being on neutral turf. I noticed it at the same time I realized that I was already walking with them in their direction. …

page 187

Part III Return to Reality

Up late this morning. At 6.00 I should already be in the lodge with Paul to correct reflection books. Paul is the best assistant I’ve ever had and this is by far the most successful workshop since the old days with Alex. Yesterday Mr Kadachi gave the VOC lecture so that we could have some time to catch up on our reports but we scrambled up onto the roof of the lodge to talk instead.

I think it is important to develop a good subject-object Foundation for the Abel position we hold collectively. …

Paul is still having Chapter Two problems about his old girlfriend. I am glad he is confiding in me. I remember all the times Kathy and I kept him away from Lisa and occupied when the centres used to come up for weekend workshop. I thought Lisa’s transfer to MFT would solve a lot. They were both trying hard to overcome and by all external appearances they had but now I’m finding out that Paul is entertaining hopes of being blessed with her. It isn’t good to think about the Blessing, especially trying to second-guess Father. Paul keeps insisting that Spirit World prepared them for the Family because they had been sweethearts since high school. . He is suffering so much and so much wants to please Heavenly Father.

We must be a good combination because we’ve been having such fantastic results with our workshops. We work as a unit. Father was right that if you serve someone well enough, you make him dependent on you. He opens up to you and gradually the power shifts its balance point. If you are a good object, it is much more important than being a mediocre subject. …

I have finally learned how to handle sleep. Imagine how much time is wasted in the Fallen World. Midnight is just the beginning of the evening for me. Paul covered for me for fifteen minutes yesterday during discussion and made me sleep. On the way down the hill with the class, he whistled for me when they passed the dorm and I was out the back way and down to the lodge before them. I had only had forty-five minutes of sleep the night before and during the past weeks it has been usually two hours, sometimes three. That fifteen minutes was like a whole night I got up completely refreshed. I think I’ve finally broken through.

I must apologize to Mr Kadachi. I was so upset with him because he slept during the day and pulled staff meetings as late as 3.30 in the morning — never before 2.00. The meetings were late only because he was reading or playing with his lizards. When he had us as a captive audience he would put off staff matters and expound on some recent theory about the Restoration. I contradicted one of his theories and still feel horrible about it but it did bring the meeting to a quick close. No one else would dare stand up to Kadachi-san. …

The day sailed by with its own effortless momentum. In the afternoon I was called into the kitchen for a phone call. Mr Kadachi was pacing. I picked up the receiver.

‘Erica? I was afraid I wouldn’t get through to you. They gave me the usual runaround.’

‘Well, Mom, sometimes I’m busy and can’t get to the phone.’

‘Too busy to take a call from me?’

I rolled my eyes up. How would she like it if I interrupted her at work?

‘I’m here in San Bernardino and I hope you won’t give me some story about being too busy to see me today. We have a date, you know.’

Did we? It seemed that I was always trying to get out of some engagement and I kept postponing these visits with promises. Guess she finally caught up with me. Kadachi was at my side poking around in his lizardarium. I placed my hand over the receiver.

‘She says she’s in San Bernardino and wants to see me today.’

‘You have a workshop to look after. Tell her to make it another time.’

I uncovered the receiver. ‘I have a workshop to look after. Could we make it another time?’

‘Erica, I’ve driven all this way.’ She sounded a bit frantic. ‘Are you going to make me turn around and go back? I’m leaving for New York tomorrow, remember, and I want to see you before I go.’

‘She’s insisting. She says she’s driven all this way and wants to know if I’m going to make her turn around and go back. She’s leaving for New York tomorrow.’

Kadachi gave me a look that revealed nothing and turned back to his lizards. How could I be so weak as to have to bother him and get him to tell me what to do?

‘Look, Ma, I’m going to have to go now. My class is starting.’

Click

I was hardly out the door when the phone rang again. It took three calls before I was reluctantly given permission to go. I wasn’t pressuring either side, they just fought it out with me as the transmitter of information. The condition was that I be back for evening discussion. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world anyway.

By the time she and my step-father Chuck arrived, I was bathed and had styled my hair with a blow-dryer I found in the sisters’ cabin. I also found a ‘good’ set of clothes I’d never seen before. They fit and I looked very nice when I sized myself up in the mirror.

I ran down the steps of the lodge to meet them. The guard at the gate had already informed me of their arrival. After quick hellos I found myself in an argument. I wanted them to come inside and meet my friends. They replied flatly that they were not interested in coming in, only in seeing me.

‘You say you’re interested in what I’m doing. How are you ever going to find out if you don’t see for yourselves? You just keep reading those negative articles.’

They could hardly conceal their discomfort and my mother couldn’t pass the opportunity for some hostile remarks so I decided that it was better to leave right away. Then, at least, I could return earlier. Paul was thrilled about taking over for a while and I was looking forward to the meal so it wasn’t a bad arrangement after all. I told them to wait a moment on the landing. I searched for Kadachi to say goodbye. His wife told me he had locked himself in his room at his cabin. I would probably return before he emerged from his meditation.

I slid in the front seat between my parents and chattered the whole way down the mountain. I told them about Roy’s close scrape with his parents. They had tried to kidnap him but he escaped. He was sorry for hurting his father in the tussle on the ground but not sorry enough to speak with them. I usually handled Roy’s calls. They simply would not understand that he had been transferred. They thought we were hiding him. No one at camp even knew where he had been transferred to.

‘Imagine parents trying to do something like that to their own child!’ I gasped.

Chuck dropped us off at a small restaurant in town while he went to see about getting something fixed on the car. I ordered a large meal and wolfed it down. Mom didn’t touch what she had ordered. She said that she was coming down with flu and had lost her appetite. If my stomach had been able to stretch, I would’ve eaten her meal as well. We didn’t talk much. These days we had little in common. I couldn’t see the point in pretending to be interested in the Fallen World and she refused to take an interest in the Restoration. She kept glancing at her watch, obviously worried about Chuck taking so long.

When he arrived, he said he wasn’t hungry either and they wanted to beat the traffic back to town. They still had to pack for their trip. He hastily paid the bill and we went out to the car. The lot was dark and the car was at the rear of the building. I instinctively sized up the lot for fundraising. Hard habit to get over. Good thing I was going back to camp instead of out blitzing.

I was grabbed from behind and thrown forward. It happened so quickly that I was in the back seat between Chuck and a strange man before I caught my breath. My mind jammed. My mother was in the driver’s seat revving the engine and another person sat in the front seat on the passenger’s side. We took off as the doors were being pulled closed.

It was several moments before I could speak. My mind snapped into the witnessing mode. I politely extended my hand to the man on my right to introduce myself.

‘How do you do? My name is Erica.’

He reached under the seat and brought out a bouquet of flowers. Presenting them, he said, ‘Very well, thanks. My name is Dana. Here, these are for you.’

Dana! I couldn’t believe it. Dana Stevens? It must have been ten years since I’d seen him — he’d been living in Paris for that long. He was a dear friend of the family, someone I had been infatuated with as a child. Mom had told me that he had come back a few weeks before to get married.

I could not recognize him in the dark but there was no mistaking his style. I looked at the person in the front seat. A woman. She must be his new wife.

‘Mrs Stevens, do you mind if I embrace your husband?’ I threw my arms around Dana’s neck. It was totally unprincipled but my mind was jilted and I was too happy to see him to care about Principle for that moment.

My mother had the wheel gripped firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Erica. You didn’t show up at Dana’s wedding so we’re going to have another reception party now just for you.’ I believed her even though I still felt a panic. I had no time to be part of a practical joke. They would worry back at camp, especially Kadachi. I pleaded for her to stop and let me phone them at least. My mother could always out-insist me, especially when I became hysterical. I thought of leaping from the car, disregarding the danger, but I was flanked by two strong men. Roy had told everyone to carry matches with them so they could set fire to the place if anyone ever took them by force. A lot of good that would have done me. I was no longer in the mood for conversation and numbly rode the rest of the way in silence. My mind was blank as if I had been unplugged.

We pulled off the freeway somewhere in Long Beach and, after circling around some residential streets, pulled up at a modest house with several cars parked in the driveway. They surrounded me on the few steps into the house and then, with some other people, formed a corridor so that I had no choice but to go past them to the rear of the house. I didn’t know how many people were in the house or who they were. It didn’t look like a party.

I entered a small bedroom at the end of the hall. The room was tiny, carpeted and bare except for a blanket and a pillow. There was a piece of plywood covering the one small window. Through my mind flashed the story of The Collector. It was clear to me that I was going to be held prisoner for someone’s pleasure but I had no idea for what purpose.

The sight of the blanket and pillow made my heart stop. I knew this was the end of the line. When I looked up I saw half a dozen strangers standing around me. The door was shut. It was explained to me that I would have to speak with these people. Disbelief clogged my mind. They wanted to talk to me about the Movement. How could they talk to me about something they knew nothing about? I understood then that I would stay in that room until I converted them all or died — there would be no way to escape unless I could befriend one of them and gain sympathy to be set free. I wondered how that tiny room would look after the first year. I would know every crack on the ceiling, every sound from the outside. I looked for Dana. Surely he would help.

‘Can I see Dana please?’

‘I’ll see if I can find him for you. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’ It was a woman who spoke. She was thirty-ish, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She looked nervous, which gave me confidence. She left the room and two or three of the others trailed out with her.

Dana appeared at the door. His shirt was unbuttoned and he had a beer in his hand. He looked at me with mild surprise as if he couldn’t fathom why I might want to speak with him.

‘Dana, what do you think you’re going to prove with this? I’m going to be missed at camp by people who care about me. What sort of a kangaroo court do you intend to hold? You’re holding me prisoner. You can’t do that.’

Spectacularly unimpressed with my plea to his sense of justice, he suppressed a belch and scratched his chest. ‘I’m not the one who made the decision, you know. Your mother wants you here. It can’t hurt to listen.’

‘Listen? Under these conditions? Why didn’t you just arrange to have these people, whoever they are, come and meet me in a coffee shop somewhere? I would discuss anything with anyone at any time. That’s my job.’

‘Well, your anywhere and anytime and anyone seems to be here and now with these folks, doesn’t it?’

The years had changed him. I remembered the late-night talks, how, he had made my head spin with his unconventional ideas. He was the one who first infected me with the idea of breaking free. Now he had sold out like the rest of them, even getting a beer belly. There would be no point in talking to my mother. I knew how she was once she made up her mind about something. I asked to see Chuck. I knew he would not be able to conceal anything. His face always gave him away. He had always listened to my ideas with endless patience and took my troubles to heart. He supported and nurtured my individualism with pride, even the things that must have been hard to swallow. Surely he would understand me now. Yet when he came in and sat in the same place that Dana had been sitting, I wondered if I was going to come up against the same stone wall. Maybe they had some kind of routine worked out. We were no longer on the same team. God had divided us.

He didn’t give me the chance to wonder long. He took me in his arms. ‘We had to do this, honey.’ His voice broke and he cried, unable to speak for a while. ‘It’s a horrible thing to have to see you here like this. We want you to be free. I know that’s a hard thing to understand, that we’ve locked you up to free your mind. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t love you. All we want you to do is to listen to these people. They’re good people, honey, don’t be afraid. You know your mom would never let anyone hurt you. That’s why she wants you away from that group. We miss our girl — the one who’s so free, the one who was never afraid to stand up for what she believed.’

Now it was my turn to force back the tears so I could speak.

‘Will you stay with me?’ I was terrified of the thought of them leaving the next day for New York.

‘Of course we’ll stay with you.’ It was my mother. She must have been listening at the door. I didn’t hear her come in.

‘You aren’t going to New York?’

‘No, that was just a story to get you to come with us. We were so afraid that you would cancel again and now that we brought Sara out here —’

‘Sara? Is she that lady? The one in the shorts.’

My mother held a handkerchief for me to blow my nose as she had done when I was a child. ‘Now the other side, blow hard, you can do better than that.’ I laughed through the tears until Sara walked in with some others and my panic returned.

I decided to size up my captors. Mom and Chuck left the room. The others sat around me in a semi-circle. Danny had been in the Children of God. He said he’d been deprogrammed by Sara.

Doug had been in the Family. As soon as I learned this I tried to see the brother in him. Sometimes he revealed it but he had been in the Fallen World too long. The brother in him was only a flicker. Perhaps he would be the one I would befriend if I could convince him of Principle. He could help me escape back to Father. Would that make him my spiritual son? He did not want to talk about his spiritual parents or his missions. He said they were not important. What else could there be to talk about if we were going to talk about the Family?

Jill had been in the Family too, but not long enough to know very much.

I didn’t know quite what to make of Sara. She seemed to try to blend into the background and quite succeeded — all but those eyes of hers. Every time she caught my glance she pinned me to the spot.

Something was rattling around loose in my mind trying to find where it belonged. Maybe my whole mind was rattling around loose. I felt fatalistic — the controls were jammed on automatic pilot I felt almost... well, sportive, gay... having the burden of the destiny of mankind lifted from me temporarily. The ball was for once in somebody else’s court. A funny thought lifted the corners of my mouth. Old girl, you only get kidnapped once in life, that is, unless you’re terribly unlucky. You may as well have a good time. After all, you’ve got a captive audience.

I made myself comfortable. ‘It looks like we’ll be here for a while,’ I remarked breezily. ‘If you want to do your job properly, you’ll need some background information on me. I guess I’d better tell you about myself.’

Danny stretched out and groaned, then unclasped his hands from behind his neck and drew himself up on one elbow. ‘The only thing we need to know about you is already obvious. You’re brainwashed.’

‘You watch too many movies. Who do you think you are, Clint Eastwood? Where did you get this brainwashing stuff?’

‘Well, Queen-for-a-Day, what happened to your humility, love, understanding for mankind and all of that? If you were a real disciple of Christ, you’d be praying for me and setting a good example. I guess your dignity and integrity only work when you’re plugged into your little messiah.’

Doug shot him a look to keep quiet. Interesting. They were not united so I was bound to triumph. First rule of Principle. Unity forms the Foundation. I had the knowledge of Principle on my side, they had nothing, not even unity. Evidently Doug remembered something of it in trying to keep Danny in line.

Danny rolled onto his back and addressed the ceiling. ‘All right, go ahead and give us your testimony. I probably know it word-for-word already. I’ve heard enough of them and they’re all the same. Don’t tell me, let me guess — you went to India, came back and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, had an abortion, became a militant feminist —’

Doug cut in, ‘Don’t mind him. Sure, I want to hear your story. It’s hard to be a Moonie. You wouldn’t be where you are unless you were a good person but don’t tell me that you joined because you realized it was the truth. None of us joined because we understood what they were teaching us.’

I began my story. To my surprise, it didn’t come out like I had planned it. It wasn’t my usual testimony. I told them about my life before, about the things I had loved and believed, things I had forgotten until then. I must have talked for two hours. Sara was pacing outside. Jill left for a while and when she came back in she asked me if I wanted anything to eat.

‘No thanks,’ I answered. ‘I had dinner with my mother.’ My mind drifted back to the camp for a moment. It seemed universes away. I wondered where I was. Whose house was this?

‘Is this Sara’s house?’

‘No,’ Jill answered. ‘It belongs to a woman named Alice.’

‘Can I see her?’

A woman was brought to the door. She hesitated before coming in. She was a friendly looking, middle-aged lady, the kind I’d seen by the hundreds on the lots, motherly, middle-class. I thanked her for letting us use her house. It seemed to me that it must have been a great inconvenience to have so many people in her home for such a long time. I indicated the boarded window. I was sorry for my being the cause of her house being turned upside-down. Tears formed in her eyes.

‘Honey, your parents love you very much. Everyone here is very concerned for you. We all want the best for you. Everything will turn out all right.’ She hesitated and phrased her question shyly. Jill says that you don’t want anything to eat. Can I bring you something else? Something to drink? How about a glass of warm milk?’

Warm milk, yech. I always hated it and gagged on it but I didn’t want to refuse her hospitality. For her sake I gratefully accepted. I was glad I did when I saw the look on her face. She couldn’t have been more happy if I’d given her a million dollars.

While she was fetching the milk, the conversation turned away from me and the kids talked among themselves. I couldn’t hate them. I wished that I could have joined in the conversation but it was as if they were speaking another language, things I hadn’t any knowledge of. Danny was sprawled out comfortably. Jill was teasing him and heaved the pillow at him. He propped himself up with it and turned to me.

‘So, this Moon is the messiah, eh?’

The devil himself couldn’t have been more satanic. What a way to talk about Father! It slashed my heart to hear him referred to as ‘Moon’. I would have to educate this guy if we were going to be able to talk at all. He would have to learn to call him Reverend Moon.

‘History will show if he is the messiah or not Reverend Moon has —’

‘I know, he has the potential of becoming the messiah but now he is in the John the Baptist position. I’ve heard it all before. Why don’t you just come out and say it. It will save us a good twenty-four hours. Don’t give me all the PR lines. I know you believe he’s the messiah.’

‘Well, I have to define what messiah means.’

‘Yeah, he has to be born in Korea between certain years — where’d you get all this information anyway? I could tell you that the messiah has to be 5’5”, have blue eyes and be born in Los Angeles in 1952. How’s that grab ya?’

‘God has revealed certain things to me.’

‘What’d He do, call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’

‘Don’t try to get off the subject by attacking me. Yes, I believe in God but my God doesn’t go around talking to me. Just answer a simple question: did God call you on the phone?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘Does that mean no?’

‘No, God did not call me on the phone. There, are you satisfied?’

‘Did He send you a telegram?’

Doug broke in. ‘What he means is how does God communicate with you. You said that God revealed certain things to you. How did you receive them?’

How did I receive them? I just knew. ‘I just knew.’

‘Maybe you just knew wrong?’

‘Divine Principle clearly outlines the qualifications for the messiah.’

‘Great, who wrote the Divine Principle?’

‘It was revealed by God.’

Doug looked at Danny. ‘You getting dizzy yet? I told you the Moonies have everything tied up and you can go round and round for ages without getting anywhere.’

Danny sat up and looked at me. ‘It’s no different than my group. We believed our leader was the end-time prophet Why? Because his doctrine said so. I thought God revealed it to me too.’

‘Well, you were misled. Divine Principle talks about that. You were in a cult’

‘And you are in one.’

Alice came in with the milk and my mother trailed in after her.

‘Are you getting sleepy? I brought you some things to sleep in.’ She produced a nightgown and slippers. My eyes popped out of my head. A nightgown no one had worn before. It was so beautiful, so elegant, and slippers. I couldn’t wait to put them on.

‘Where can I change?’ Surely I wasn’t expected to change in front of the men. I had heard that men in deprogrammings humiliated and raped sisters.

Danny and Doug stood to leave.

‘Good-night, Brothers.’

Doug said good-night but Danny couldn’t resist getting in one last little dig. ‘In case you didn’t know, we are not biologically related. Brothers is also not a common slang term — it’s a Moonie word. The sooner you stop talking like a Moonie, the sooner you’ll stop thinking like one. Do me a favour, hey? Every time you use a Moonie word and I stop you, try substituting an English word.’

‘Okay, good-night, Clint Eastwood. How’s that?’

He tossed the pillow at me.

Sara and I were alone. She was cautious but wanted to know how I felt, what I needed, what my fears and anticipations were. There was nothing about her or any of the others that would cause me to distrust them. I could see that they were sweet and honest people, just misled and being used by satanic forces. Mostly, my mind was on sleep. The opportunity to sleep away from masses of people, in clean bedding, in a quiet house, in my own nightdress, close to my parents — it was too much of a luxury to put off.

Sara asked if I would mind if she and Jill slept in the room with me. I laughed. Would I mind having only two sisters in the room with me? I was under the covers in a flash and the light was turned out. They left the door ajar. They were going to sit in the kitchen for a while and come to sleep later. Mom came in to say good-night. I made her promise me one last time that she would not leave for New York that she would be there when I awoke in the morning. I don’t remember if she left before I fell asleep.

With the window boarded over and no sunlight, I had no idea what time it was. By habit, I was completely awake. From totally off to totally on in a millisecond. I tried to fall asleep again but it was useless. I’d have to get up sometime and face the music. This was Sunday. I had probably missed Pledge. I couldn’t muster my thoughts to say a proper Pledge but I started in on a short prayer. Security and anxiety were marbled in my heart As long as we talked about Principle, I would be safe. They were not united and they did not have God’s truth. There was no way they could harm me. It would just be a matter of time. Sara came in.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you. I just came in to find my brush.’

‘It’s okay, I just woke up before you came in. What time is it anyway?’

‘Ten o’clock. Bet you’ve never had such a good sleep in the cult.’

Cult! That word hurled frustration, fear and anger at me. I stood up quickly and began to fold my bedding.

‘You want to take a shower?’

‘Yes, thank you. If I may.’

Sara showed me across the hall. What a luxurious bathroom. I felt like a princess. A fresh set of towels were set out for me and everything was spotless. A new toothbrush and a new tube of toothpaste, a hairbrush, even some cosmetics. I turned the shower on full blast. Sara yelled through the door.

‘There’s plenty of hot water. Let’s forget about the cold shower conditions, okay?’

‘Okay!’ How did she know about conditions? She obviously didn’t know very much. I couldn’t set a condition without clearing it with a central figure anyway. I stepped into the shower. Ah, I would have a hard time stepping out again. I watched the steam escape through a small window. I remembered in The Collector that the woman had thrown a note out the window in hopes that someone would pass by and read it. Maybe I could do that. But what good would it do? I was in the Fallen World now. Even if I could squeeze out the window and run away, to the police maybe, they’d just bring me back here. In Satan’s world who would help a Family member? I would have to work it another way. I didn’t have enough mental power to consider the future anyway. It was all I could do to concentrate on the present I was being bombarded with new-old sensations, the things in the bathroom, the cleanliness, the newness, the freshness, the comfort and security. I was reluctant to turn off the shower. My mother came in and talked to me through the shower door. She wanted to know if I needed shampoo or anything else. If nothing else, it was overwhelming to be with her in circumstances that seemed so normal. It was like being on holiday. Maybe I could postpone the inevitable confrontation. I felt a surge of energy and wanted to crow with pleasure. Sleeping until ten o’clock!

Mom brought me some clothes to change into, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It felt deliciously wonderful and forbidden to wear them. I asked permission to keep the slippers on. She gave me a queer look

The bedding was put away and the room was bare again but for one blanket and a pillow. As I dried my hair with a towel, Danny asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I wasn’t in the mood for eating. We decided on coffee.

He brought it in and went out again for his Bible. Doug carried in a small case of papers. They wanted to talk about fundraising. Fair enough. Doug had been on MFT. I couldn’t understand why he asked me questions he already knew the answers to — questions about the Economic Restoration. It was as boring as giving lecture to answer him.

They couldn’t do anything to dislodge the truth. After all, they had nothing better to offer. Nothing better than beer, cigarettes, divorce — the Fallen World. I remembered how Larry had told me that even if God did not exist and if Father wasn’t the messiah, the gathering of dedicated people giving endlessly of themselves was bound to be the best thing yet.

‘Why do you lie on the streets when you beg money from people?’ Sara entered into our discussion.

‘I don’t lie. I never did. Lie about what?’

‘Lie about where the money was going.’

‘Everyone knew I was from the Unification Church. We even wore —’

‘— badges issued by President Salonen,’ Doug. ‘But most people didn’t understand that you were a Moonie. If they ask you outright if you are raising money for Reverend Moon, you deny it, don’t you?’

‘Never! I’m proud of Father. Why would I conceal the truth?’

‘You lied to Tom Evans.’ Now my mother. Okay, I made a sales pitch in the gallery of someone who worked with my mother and by the time I realized who he was I couldn’t retract what I had said.

‘Okay, so I lied once.’

‘Once!’ Everyone cried out in unison.

I was not hurt for myself. I was trying to shield Father from their attack. Nothing they could say or do to me would worry me, but they must not blaspheme.

Sara said, You don’t even know when you’re lying and when you’re not. You weren’t like that before. Somebody taught you a little trick called Heavenly Deception.’ Danny chimed in, Yeah, we did the same thing in the Children of God but we called it Spoiling Egypt.’

Sara continued ‘And in Scientology they call it Fair Game and in the Divine Light Mission they call it something else and I call it a con game. How could you tell people the truth about where the money was going when you don’t even know yourself? What about your little 40-day condition that was extended? Where did that money go?’

How did she know about that? I told her what I had found out. The money went to buy some land.

‘That land was already paid for, honey. The money you raised went straight into Moon’s pocket for some little private business deals. Wake up, Erica, you’ve been had.’

I turned to Doug. ‘You know the importance of fundraising. It is to pay indemnity. We have to restore tribal, national and other levels.’

Doug turned to his case of papers and fished out a page from Master Speaks. He read to me from it that Father said all of that indemnity was paid already. I demanded to see the page. Master Speaks. The first thing that hit me seeing it was the format of the page. The familiarity of it energized me. He snatched it back.

‘Don’t space out on me. I know you are visually programmed. The sight of the thing reinforces your programming. Just read these lines.’

I read them. How did I know the paper wasn’t a forgery. ‘Mother, how could you want me to believe people as low as these. Look at Sara. Look at the way she’s dressed, the way she speaks.’ Sara stiffened.

‘Please don’t smoke in front of me either,’ I demanded. How satanic to fill the room with smoke. She didn’t say a word, just stubbed out her cigarette and put the ashtray outside the door.

‘I won’t smoke in front of you if it bothers you but I’ll tell you this, you spoiled brat, it’s not the smoke that bothers you. It’s this holier-than-thou little goodie-two-shoes routine of yours. Why don’t you come back down to earth with the rest of us mortals. You can’t even answer simple questions. How thin your perfection is when you’re outside your self-centred cult. You think you’ve become more God-like? Is God so arrogant? You think you’re saving the world with Moon’s money? What do you know about responsibility? Do you tend the sick, the poor, do you ever pay income tax?’

‘I’m a missionary without income. I have nothing to pay tax on.’

‘Maybe, but you have to file every year with the government anyway. When was the last time you filed?’

‘Okay, so I didn’t file last year, big deal.’

The morning dragged on. They kept talking from man’s point-of-view. I kept talking from God’s point-of-view.

We broke for lunch and, while we ate at least, the crew eased up on me. As soon as I put my plate down, Danny looked over at me through narrowed eyes.

‘So, Moon’s still the messiah, huh?’

I had to fight to keep the food from coming back up. There was just no point going on like this. We could discuss until Satan’s restoration and they still wouldn’t make sense.

‘You can say what you want but you’ll never make me lose my love for Father.’

‘Erica, when we point things out, just assess them as they are, at face value. If the Bible says one thing and Doctrine X contradicts it, then that doctrine is wrong if it claims to be harmonious with the Bible. You click off when anything threatens Moon. You have no ego, no mind of your own. You’ve got two possibilities: a) Moon is the messiah, b) Moon is not the messiah. If it helps you, let’s not say Moon, we’ll say Mr X instead. Now, he’s either the messiah or he’s not. He can’t sort of be the messiah, agreed?’

It took us a long time to get on equal footing. Finally he got me to accept, for the sake of argument, the hypothetical.

‘If he is the messiah, we can all pack up and go home. If he’s not the messiah and has claimed to be, then what is he?’

I couldn’t fill in the blank.

‘If he’s not the messiah and he’s claimed to be, then he’s a fraud. Now, how can we determine if he is or not? Glad you asked that question, folks. Let’s make it really easy on him and not even use the acid test. We’ll just let him cut his own throat. He says that God is eternal, absolute and unchanging, further that he is the second Christ. It follows, seeing as God doesn’t change His mind, Moon must jive with what the first Christ said about Christ’s mission.’

This was not so difficult to accept as the initial point. Once he got rolling, I could follow him after a fashion. As soon as he pulled out the Bible to substantiate what he said, to prove that Jesus and Father did not agree, I was hopelessly lost again. Every time he made a point, I would do a quick scan through Purpose/Fall/Restoration.

I was aware of the binary functioning of my brain. Each question entered and was shuffled off down yes/no corridors until it met the proper answer or a dead end. Something like a pinball machine. I worked the flippers like mad but the balls just rolled down the chute. Danny would send the ball shooting out again and I made the same scan through Principle with the same result. Sometimes a phantom answer would appear but it would vanish either before or after the question passed through. I couldn’t hold both a question that didn’t compute and a phantom answer that didn’t compute. One of them faded as I concentrated on the other.

Danny was well versed in the Bible. If only Kadachi or Alex could have been with me. Surely they would know the answers. There had to be Divine Principle reasons why the Bible was wrong, I just didn’t know them. After a while my attention scattered. When we talked about the Family, I felt my mind become agile again but as soon as Danny started up with his Bible, my brain felt like cotton and my eyelids started to droop.

Some people came in the room quietly like they were entering a theatre after the show had started. I felt like I was on the operating table in an arena for medical students. Bright lights and someone saying, ‘Here we see the soul exposed, badly lacerated. The heart is bleeding and the mind is twisted. Some of this will be corrected through surgery but the patient will probably never be healthy again.’

One of the visitors, a middle-aged man with a kind face picked up Danny’s Bible and leafed through it. I braced myself for a raging born-again argument ‘You believe you’re doing God’s will, don’t you?’ Probably next he was going to ask me if I knew God’s will by telephone or telegram. I set my jaw. It’s too long a story to explain — if I told you that I know God when I see Father, you’d never understand.

‘You’d do whatever Moon asked you to, wouldn’t you?’ ‘He would never ask me to do anything that was not the will of God.’

‘What if he asked you to kill your mother?’

‘ — ’

‘Why don’t you answer me?’

‘ — ’

‘Forget about answering that question. Your silence tells me what I really wanted to know: you actually have to sit and think about whether or not you’d kill your mother if a man told you to. A man, Erica, not a god, and you are under his control.’

He snatched up the Bible. The sound of the turning pages was like trees falling in the forest.

‘“If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The Bible says to help the poor, to help other people. Jesus didn’t tell his followers to give Him their possessions. He told them to distribute them among the needy. Do you believe that is a good thing to do?’

I nodded.

‘Well, then, that makes you better than True Father, doesn’t it? You want to give to the poor and your messiah only wants to take everything for himself.’

I was too weary to begin to explain to him the meaning of the Economic Restoration. When Jesus was on earth, it was the mission of the messiah to serve mankind. For the Second Coming, it became the duty of mankind to serve the messiah.

He wouldn’t let go of that point. That makes you a better person than your Master of the Universe, doesn’t it?

‘You have more compassion than he does. You don’t see anything wrong with him keeping everything for himself?’

I thought back to Father’s visit that had left me so desolated. I remembered that the brothers and sisters from the centres drove through the night to get back to their centres and sleep only an hour or two before having to drive back for Father’s morning address. Meanwhile, Father was sleeping in silk sheets. He could have at least let them sleep in the garage. One driver fell asleep and his van had gotten into an accident.

I began to cry. The man holding the Bible was looking at me waiting for an answer. I couldn’t speak. He put the Bible down and cradled me. So long I had been giving, giving, giving everything I had. He rocked me gently and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re right here. Don’t be afraid. We’re all going to see you through this, doll.’ He didn’t try to hush me, he just let me cry. I tried picturing True Father in my mind but I could not see him comforting me like this. I couldn’t believe that even in the Spirit World he was beside me. All I knew was the here-and-now of things and their realness. Fear gripped me — so this is how Satan would win me — with confusion, with trying to soften the warrior in me.

I heard myself make the man promise he would come back the following day. When he went to the door, I got up and extended my hand, Moonie-style, to shake hands with him. He grabbed me in a bear hug and ruffled my hair, ‘You’re gonna be all right, kid.’

With the others, discussions went on without either side gaining. I retreated under the blanket. Only my head showed, propped on the pillow. Doug and Sara and Jill continued. They would go through a point and ask me to clarify my side of it. I had just not studied enough, not read enough Master Speaks. There were answers to these things but I did not know them. The things they asked me didn’t matter. I believed in Father.

Sara asked me, ‘What I want to know is why you need so much proof to get out of the group. Lord knows you didn’t need any proof to get into it If I ask you if two plus two is five, do you need to look it up? No! You just use the common sense you had as a child. So why, if I show you things that don’t add up by Moon’s system, can’t you see it?’

Danny came over and ripped the blanket off me. ‘It’s the dead of summer, you know. The rest of us are sweating. What are you, a foetus? Sit up and join the human race.’

I grabbed the corner of the blanket and we each tugged our end of it. ‘Well, I see you have enough strength to fight for your baby blanket, don’t you have enough strength to fight for your mind? We’ve been sitting here hour after hour force-feeding you. Where’s your interest? Some disciple you are. Let’s assume that Moon is the messiah and we’re satanic. Don’t you have a lot to learn from us? You should be picking our brains for all we’ve got, go back to your cult and show them the blueprint of the opposition. You’re a lousy Moonie, I’ll say, and you’re not much of a human being. Your brain doesn’t work. We ask a simple question and you either space out or tell us something Moon said. I think we might as well just cover you up with this blanket and stick you six feet under, babe.’

He smiled. ‘But it’d be a shame, ’cause I know you’re in there, somewhere. I know because I’ve been through it. I’m only tough on you because someone’s gotta do it, otherwise we’d sit here playing games. Honest, I’m really a decent guy.’ We both started laughing. ‘We drew straws to see who would play the part of the heavie. Doug and I were arguing about it, weren’t we bro? We both accused the other of getting the part last time. I’ll tell you what, you think he’s sweet? He can be a worse son-of-a-bitch than I.’ That was signal for them to start rough-housing. We all needed a break. I went to the bathroom.

I closed the bathroom door. I’d had chances to be alone for a few moments like this in the Family but it wasn’t the same. I was never alone-alone. I looked at myself in the mirror, something I so rarely did that I knew Father’s face better than I knew my own. I noticed my locket. It had been given to me by Maria and was engraved: ITPN. In True Parents’ Name. Kadachi-san explained to me that it was blasphemy to abbreviate Parents’ name even in that much-used phrase that we signed our letters with. I wore it with some embarrassment but refused to take it off because it was given to me by my spiritual child. Maria got kicked out of the Family. Dr Baum ordered me not to talk to her anymore, even when she called up desperate to be allowed back into the Family. She was so exhausted after Yankee Stadium that she had stayed in bed for three days and Dr Baum turned her out for a problem of attitude. It tore me in two to have to refuse to come to the telephone when she called up pleading.

I unlocked the chain. That same chain had once held the cross given to me by Father Peter. Reverend Kropf made me remove it because the cross was a symbol of Satan’s victory. Inside the locket were pictures of Father and Mother. I looked at them.

I had heard that deprogrammers were likely to deface pictures of Parents and nothing could be worse, but I liked them all — even, perhaps especially, Danny. Deprogrammers could torture brothers and sisters but we had to protect Parents to the death. I removed the pictures and swallowed them to save them from harm. Everything was out of focus in my mind. As we talked in the room, the obvious Principle answers were in my mind. They were my mind. But at some point, I don’t know when, a second answer started to appear, a phantom that would hover and then disappear like the tiny stars you can only see if you look slightly away from them. The two answers would passively cancel one another and only the question would remain until I could no longer remember it. I looked at the locket in my hand. I was of two minds, two hearts. It seemed a millstone around my neck. I left it on the toilet tank.

‘Let’s talk about this messiah of yours,’ Sara. ‘Do you know anything about his past?’

I did. He had seen Jesus when he was sixteen, had been in prison before he began his ministry.

‘Did you know that the university where he claims to have gotten a degree in electrical engineering has no record of him? No record by either name. His real name isn’t Sun Myung Moon, you know. He changed it from a name that means shining dragon — sounds more like the Beast than the messiah. He’s been married before, arrested for indecent acts. He’s a common thug, a businessman, a criminal. He’s a pimp and he’s got kids like you out on the street hustling for him. He even claims to be a Jew, doesn’t he?’

‘Well, a descendant of the House of David. I guess that would make him a Jew.’

‘Funny since he claims that the Orientals are descendants of Japheth and the Jews of Shem. How do you feel about him saying that the six million who died under Hitler died because it was God’s will. This coming from a Jew.’

‘You answer that yourself. You’re the guys who claim to have all the answers.’

‘Sit up,’ Sara urged. ‘Come on, don’t cop out now. You should be defending your faith. There’s nothing wrong with thinking about things. Think! If you’re trying to find the answer in the DP, you won’t find it because the answer is just not there. Two and two will never equal five.’

My mind was elsewhere. I looked at the stack of papers. The reverse of an article we had just read was on the top of the heap. It showed a reproduction of a painting of Jesus on the cross. It was exquisite. It reminded me of the fresco I used to study in the Greek Orthodox cathedral Jesus of infinite tenderness and dignity, Jesus who by His deeds gave meaning to life. Across the stack on another part of the floor was a picture of Reverend Moon. His pudgy, glistening face peered up at me. My eyes went from one to the other, from Jesus to Reverend Moon and back again.

Sara and the others seemed at a standstill. Sara picked up the Bible and leafed through it. She stopped at a page in Genesis and handed the book to me. ‘Read that. Start with Genesis 2:24.’

I read aloud: ‘Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other —’

‘Stop right there,’ said Sara.

I looked up at her.

‘Don’t you see it? Adam and Eve were husband and wife before the Fall, not brother and sister; husband and wife, one flesh. They did not fall because they had sex before becoming perfect. And further, Lucifer fell before them because it says that Eve was tempted by a serpent, not the Archangel.’

I looked back at the page. My vision sharpened with an almost audible click. My face burned, my blood was pounding through my body. I looked back up at her. Sara was waiting.

What happened next happened clearly, frame by frame, but was all contained in a split second.

What was spectacular was not the question nor the answer but a total sensation that I had to acknowledge and identify. Doubt, I called it. Doubt. Perhaps I could entertain the possibility that what they were saying was true. I felt myself peering over a cliff. The abyss was so without light and without bottom that the shock weakened me. I feared I would fall and equally feared remaining on the edge. But no sooner did the shock seize me than I found myself on the opposite side.

The split second came as I was handing the Bible back to Sara. ‘Well, then, what was the Fall?’

‘I’ll tell you my interpretation but there are many. Everyone in this house would tell you something different and some don’t even have an opinion or couldn’t care less. That’s all okay. That’s what life’s about.’

It never occurred to me that people could have different opinions or no opinion at all. I was sure that these people would try to destroy the Divine Principle and then unveil their truth. Subconsciously, I must have believed that it would be the antithesis of goodness and that ... what a totally astounding idea that I could choose what I wanted to believe. This last idea came as Sara explained that there was no rush on truth, that I would have the rest of my life to think about things. Still, most of my mind believed that the non-Family force had the scoop on the Fall.

Sara handed me back the Bible and pointed to Genesis 3:5. It read: ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’

She stated simply, ‘If you are tempted to place yourself in the throne of power you lose your innocence and you learn the true nature of good and evil.’

At dinner-time my face was still burning. The message came in from the kitchen to find out what I wanted to drink with dinner – milk, juice, water, coke.

‘Make it a gin and tonic.’

‘Getta load of her,’ Danny nudged Doug. ‘Queen-for-a-Day is having herself a drink. Hey, no drinking on the job.’

‘Well then, we’ll take a break — and while we’re at it we can call a truce until dinner’s over. What do you say? I won’t call you Clint Eastwood and you won’t ask me if Reverend Moon is the messiah.’

I felt frisky and in a mood for celebrating something but I had nothing to celebrate. I didn’t want to cope with anything. I concentrated on my dinner.

‘Compliments to the chef!’ I called out. ‘Must’ve been you, Mom, no one cooks like you.’

Different sensations were rushing me, things I’d never known could be sensations — like spontaneity. Not checking the catalogue in my brain before or after a thought or action. Sara sat next to me with her plate.

‘Yeah, your mom is a great cook. I’ll tell you, she’s a great lady. Sure it was easy for you to make the choice between your family and the cult because you never lose your family so it’s not a real choice. You can cut them off, mistreat them, but they always love you. Moon wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you. You couldn’t get through to him on the phone now if you wanted him to come and rescue you. But your real parents? They’d go through anything to rescue you and believe me, they already have. I know you couldn’t have looked your mother in the face and told her that Mrs Moon is your True Mother. You’ve got a lot to learn about parenthood. You know how Moon is always saying that his members are more loving than anyone else and they have ‘Parental Heart’ — honey, you could never fathom what real caring is. You’ve been in a make-believe world. Moon used you. Your parents never stopped caring, never gave up on you.’

My tears were hot They had nothing to do with what she was saying. The thought of my mother’s love made me feel that I could love myself, forgive myself, cleanse myself of the never-ending guilt I had felt in the Family. For once I could feel that I had given of myself, that I was a good person. No matter what Sara said, I was not a spoiled brat. I was sincerely trying to do the best thing. I felt the two of me, one pitiful and the other pitying.

Doug joined us. He had a VOC lecture book in his hand. ‘You know, what really gets me is how you went on and on so self-righteously about Moon being against communism. What do you or anyone else in the group really know about it? Did you know that Moon uses the identical methods of indoctrination? You have the world so sharply divided between Satan and God, black and white. Do you think that fascism is any better than communism? Was Hitler any better than Stalin? I can see the Moonies on trial saying, “I was only following orders”. What about democracy?’ He paused and fished in his case for some papers.

‘You need only one error in the Divine Principle to make it false. We’ve shown you hundreds. It’s a strange thing about mind control — if you demolish most of the doctrine and leave just a tiny bit standing, the mind hangs onto it.’

Evening brought another guest. Mom had been talking about a young man who had been deprogrammed from the Divine Light Mission. She was glad that he had been able to arrange the time to come and talk with me. He talked about his job, asked how I was feeling, stayed away from heavy subjects. It was hard for me to remember how conversations were supposed to go. By the time he got to the end of a question, I had forgotten the first part of it. He sensed that I was bleary.

He set up a tape recorder for me to hear a speech by his former guru. A man with a funny accent was saying something like: when you have evil thoughts, push them out of your mind. Because your mind troubles you, give it to me. It won’t trouble me.

The young man rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. We all laughed yet it was a frightening tape. How could you be told what and what not to think? Imagine someone telling people not to use their —

Father ‘I am your thinker. I am your brain.’

Lectures: Have no give and take with negative thoughts.

It suddenly wasn’t so funny. Change the accent a little and —

The young man nodded when I looked up at him with this realization spilling out of me. The room was filled with people. Such a small room, so many conversations like a cocktail party. No one noticed the crucial understanding in that exchanged glance. It didn’t matter. In the Family everything had to be noticed, examined, accounted for and nothing belonged to me. It was always public knowledge, any private thought. This understanding was for me alone, accountable to me, a me exists. In the Family everything was given equally ultimate significance. Things do have different values. So no one noticed me. So what.

I was resting my head in my mother’s lap and she stroked my hair distractedly. She was engrossed in a conversation with Doug. Jill and Sara were laughing about something in the corner. The others were getting up to go into the kitchen. The young man from the Indian cult stretched out between my mother and the wall.

Why hadn’t Father told us about these other groups — so many of them? Sara had read me the testimonies of people I thought were all ex-Family members. Turns out they were from several other groups. All else aside, Father should have explained to us the truth about cults and mind control for our own sake.

‘Would you like to go out with me sometime?’ The young man had a nice smile.

I laughed. ‘Under the circumstances, that’s a very tempting offer.’ The escape I had wanted. I was surprised when I found myself telling him to call me at my mother’s house to arrange a date. Would I be living there?

‘Wherever you are, I’ll find you. All the employees where I work are going to Disneyland for an evening, you know, when they close the park down for a private party. Would you like to do something like that?’

Be anonymous again? Be a part of life with no one looking over my shoulder? Laugh at simple things?

How had it happened? It seemed that as soon as I entertained the possibility of something other than Principle, my prison vanished. I was free. Confused but free.

What about True Parents? I loved Father and could see him accusing me of being Judas. I pictured the photos from the locket. I visualized the image of Parents deep inside me. They would stay there until I dealt with them later. I would deal with everything later.

Before I fell asleep, Jill came in. She sat down where I was snuggled under the covers. ‘Know what I did the other night? I went down to the ocean. I kicked off my shoes and walked along the shore. I found a place to sit and I just sat there feeling the wind on my face, listening to the waves, smelling the salt air, letting the feeling of the sea surround me. I thought to myself: I am free. I can think anything I want.’

I was jealous of her. How wonderful to go to the sea. To sit at the shore and belong to no one. That most sacred and private place between me and me had been violated. I wanted the salt air to cleanse me, renew me.

What do you do when a huge section of your life is spliced out and the two ends fit neatly back together as if that time had never been — when you wonder where that lost time went but you’re still in it like a phantom — when you wonder who that other person in the time spliced out was but at the same time realize that that other person is the most familiar core of what you are made of — when you are relieved to the point of euphoria and terrified at the same time (both for no apparent reason and for endless reasons) — when you can’t go back to being that old self at the past end of the splice and certainly aren’t the self you haven’t been yet at the future end — and the reality of the matters at hand is so crushing that it requires the equivalent of a session of parliament in your brain to decide if you want a cup of coffee and when none of that really matters because everything emanates a calm like the warbling of birds after the bombing has stopped and you know the bombs will never fall again.

Another good night of sleep. In the morning we breakfasted and talked. I was aware that I no longer had any opinions about anything. I was blank. The blast had taken everything out by the roots. I was amazed that Danny and Doug disagreed on various things. The outside world was now my world and it was not united. Doug was talking to me about switching over from my absolutist frame of mind. He said that the doctrine wasn’t so important but the way I thought. Not which things were painted black and which were painted white, because these varied from cult to cult. All ex-members, he said, had to get away from thinking in black-and-white terms and start looking at the shades of grey. I was miles ahead of him. I was dealing with technicolour. Let out of a dark hole into the blazing sunlight, the eyes of my mind winced closed.

I didn’t want to leave the deprogramming room for the time. I didn’t feel deprogrammed. I was to learn that deprogramming only starts the mind thinking again, asking questions. It doesn’t provide the answers.

I was brought into the living room. The team was relaxed, limbs draped over the furniture, every comment followed by a soft round of chuckles. The world had never looked so wholesome, so inviting. It seemed that milk and honey, or sunlight or some tangible substance of peace was flowing out of everything.

Dana and his wife stopped by. They were on their way back to France. Dana told me a little bit about the concerts he was doing. His wife told me about her dress when I admired it. Alice showed me pictures of her children. Tears still formed in her eyes when she looked at me and several times she put her arm around me to say what she couldn’t find words for. She promised me that I would have a wonderful life. I hoped I didn’t look to her like someone who needed a glass of warm milk. The drifts of conversation carried jokes and casual swearing I found offensive. It was all too much for a mind that was racing nowhere fast. I wandered back into the deprogramming room and curled up on the floor with the pillow. Danny followed me in and plunked himself down.

‘Wanna talk?’

‘Sure.’

I didn’t, really. I just wanted to absorb the racing.

‘Spit it out.’

It wasn’t a matter of spitting, it was a matter of running to all the vast frontiers of my brain at once with a sieve to catch evaporating thoughts. It came out something like this:

‘Dan, I want you to watch me. I think I might be too clever, like I might be fooling you — or me — or something. I want to be deprogrammed or not deprogrammed. Maybe you know what I mean.’

‘Sorry, lady, I know what you’re going through but I can’t help you. You have to do this one alone. The ball, as they say, is in your court.’

‘What did you do after you left the Children of God?’

‘Why, so you can do the same? Sorry, I ain’t gonna be your new messiah. Besides, I don’t think you’d want to do what I did. When I found out that Moses David wasn’t the end-time prophet, I got sick. I just started to vomit. I was in bed shivering and sweating and Sara stayed up with me. It was a long time before I could go back and understand what had happened. I floated a lot. Floating means when you snap back into your programme. You’re probably not far enough out to snap back into it but when you do — it’s an eerie feeling —’

‘Like being back in the cult but not being there? Like phantoms?’

‘Like phantoms.’

Danny stood up and moved for the door. ‘Piecing things back together takes a long time. You have to learn to be patient with yourself — like when you get your leg out of a cast, you can’t run on it right away.’

I could hear the others laughing in the living room. I stared at the carpet. My senses were like bees out of the hive. I could see the carpet. The blue was so intense I could almost hear it. I could take the feel of it under my hands. I could feel my heart beat. A few moments, a few precious moments of awareness. I would have a lifetime of them. Cradling myself I thought no one, no one can ever take this away from me. Yet hadn’t someone already done that? Yes, I would have to have patience even to find the place to begin again.

‘Honey?’ My mother was standing at the door. ‘Can you come here for a minute? We want to ask you something.’ In the next room Chuck was sitting on the bed. Mom shut the door. The floor was piled high with a tangle of clothes spilling out of half-open suitcases. My mother sat on the edge of the bed, choosing her words gingerly.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like Lazarus. Whatever the question, the answer is probably going to be “why not”?’

‘Erica, we have to decide what you’re going to do now. You know that you have all the time in the world and that we’re always here for you but Sara thinks it would be a good idea for you to go home with her for a while. Some time to rest and learn some more. She has answers we simply don’t have. There is so much more you have to sort out for yourself.’

The thought appealed to me. Of course, just like the ladies in nineteenth-century novels who took a cruise or sojourned at an auntie’s when they were grieving. But on the heels of this came an image of Sara’s house. So many new things to cope with. She would have friends visiting. The thought of having to face anyone new was staggering. Of having to fill my time. If only I could hide away, but where? I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, not even my sister, until I was better. Before I could finish the thought, a tidal wave of tears tore everything loose. They were not tears of self-pity, frustration or grief. They were not tears of relief. They were tears I was born with. I wanted to cry to the bottom of them so I would never have to cry again. I don’t know how long we were there, Mom and Chuck crying too before Sara poked her head in the door.

‘Mind?’ she abbreviated.

Mom and Chuck exited. Sara curled up on the bed.

‘Enough clothes for the first six months, eh? I’ll say. It’s been what, two or three days? You sure don’t travel light ’ I found a sleeve of something to mop my face with.

‘Coming to New York with me?’ Sara never cut any fancy footwork, never introduced a subject. She searched my face. The invitation was sincere.

I grinned. ‘When do we leave?’

pages 228-236

When you hurt yourself somehow, fall down or get in a fight, you walk away thinking you’re feeling pain until you wake up the next morning and the soreness has set in and you puff up and turn every colour of the rainbow. I was going along for a while thinking, jeez, there’s not much to this when the shock wave returned from its journey of reverberation and smacked me. I was so bottomed-out physically that I didn’t get to the mental problems for a long time.

Most of the first month I slept I’d get up at ten and be back in bed by three in the afternoon. It was hot and humid. I shared Sara’s bedroom, a converted attic. There were windows at both ends under the eaves and the heavy summer wind passed through the room. Whenever I closed my eyes and put my head on the pillow, I felt I was falling into a thick darkness with such a strong force that there was no way to hold back. Sleep locked me into a blackness violently swarming with images. I would wake up screaming or imagining that I had screamed. No matter where she was in the house, Sara would hear me make the slightest stir and would appear at my side to put on the light, smooth down the covers and listen to me until I was quiet again.

It was during that time that I became familiar with a nightmare that recurred for years. A black ocean devoid of life. No matter how far inland I was, the waves would find me and suck me out to the depths. It was not the water that frightened me because I could breathe in it. It wasn’t a fear of sharks or sea monsters. Not even a microbe lived in the sterile inkyness. It was the power and vastness of it.

I was extremely sensitive to light and sounds. Crowds made me dizzy; the faces would blend and I’d grow faint. My memory and attention spans were useless. I couldn’t read or converse for more than a few minutes without getting completely worn down and needing a rest Reading a newspaper article could take an hour. How would I ever catch up on the world since my Rip Van Winkle sleep in the cult? I even had to learn about the things I’d not been isolated from but merely blanked out of my perception like the changes in clothing styles.

Sara had to keep reminding me to think for myself, to not look to her for opinions, to not soak up whatever I heard. But she had little trouble getting me to try new things. Boating, skating, concerts, dancing, water-skiing — but not all things came easily. Remembering how I had served Kadachi-san and all the guests at headquarters house soft drinks and had never been allowed to drink something so fine myself, I swore I’d drink the stuff until I burst In the cult I had served from bottles and didn’t know that drink cans had since changed and were manufactured with pop tabs. I saw the cans in the fridge and balked. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to open one and didn’t venture to try for several months. I never knew when I would excel and when I would fail, when the next step would be on rotten floorboards or on no floor at all. I glossed over with what I hoped was a sophisticated appearance by remembering things from the old Erica.

Sara read me as if I had neon signs flashing what I needed. When something needed to be resolved, she never hesitated to draw me into discussion but dancing the polka at Polish weddings, sitting on the front stoop eating watermelon, taking a martini break from a shopping spree, washing the dog and chasing each other around the yard with the hose — these did more for me than years of psychotherapy ever could have.

I shuddered to think if I had been institutionalized instead of deprogrammed I would have been in a hospital for years getting worse. Sara knew what she was doing. She had first gotten involved when her brother fell prey to a nomadic cult and disappeared. He got arrested hundreds of miles away and when they went to claim him, they found a total stranger who spoke in Bible verse, wore a long robe and had been surviving by scrounging food from garbage tins. After straightening him out, handling a Moonie was a piece of cake.

She took me out to meet people — seemed like she knew everyone in the whole state. We gave talks about mind control. We’d pull into a small town, talk to the school kids, the local paper, the service club luncheon and then have the whole town turn out in the evening to hear us speak at the church. What a welcome to the Fallen World! Total strangers listening to me with tears in their eyes, pinching my cheeks, giving me their addresses in case I ever needed them for anything. The warmth and attention were wonderful but I started to feel like a circus exhibit.

Sara started doing deprogrammings at home. It was my turn to say: I’ve been in your shoes. Every time I watched a deprogramming, another huge burden was lifted. They didn’t all break out of mind control in the same way. Kara from Ananda Marga let out screams that shook the house and Billy from The Way calmly balanced his Bible on his knee, took off his spectacles to wipe them and observed, ‘Well, it certainly appears that I’ve been deceived.’ Some said nothing but flushed in stunned silence. It was always miraculous to see the real person suddenly rush into the robot shell.

We worked together on floating until each person learned to handle it alone. We recognized the symptoms in one another instantly and instinctively. Sometimes the eyes would glaze over or the person would drop out of conversation. My own mind was like a minefield. I never knew when I’d trip an explosion. Sometimes I’d catch it like a contact high from one of the others, sometimes a phrase, a snatch of a song, maybe an unresolved bit of doctrine and always parking lots. Going to stores was a trial. I’d automatically check the lot for the flow, for the clues from Spirit World. If no one else was around, I’d work myself into a panic. I’d think what if, what if. If they are right, I’ve been deceived by Satan. My mind would start pacing and sniffing its old haunt, Purpose/Fall/ Restoration, and I’d snap back, or only half snap back and be spread between here and nowhere.

The thing to do was trace the floating back and resolve the problem that had triggered it In the cult they told us to cut off doubt Sara encouraged it Challenge, weigh, delve, decide. In the cult they told us that everything about the other world was evil. Sara told us not to destroy our good memories and benefits from the cult, people we loved, things we had learned and overcome.

Floating was only the punctuation, not the constant

The constant was exhilaration. The intensity of it was sure to illuminate the rest of my life. Every time I encountered something, I considered it as if I had never known of it before. There is an essence one can sometimes feel for a quiver of a moment when he looks at the stars. I felt that all the time. The smallest thing was not without its glory. Being able to sit down without permission, without guilt Buying a postage stamp with my own money and being able to send a letter of my very own thoughts to anyone. Feeling the wind, seeing the buildings, smelling the earth, letting my imagination run free. And being able to say no.

This expanding, more than anything else, combated floating. I simply could not fit back into that narrow mental slot. When I realized that, I knew that even though I was not completely healed, it was time for me to get back into the world.

I was prepared to enter society at the bottom rung, having been used to meeting handicaps that I never knew I had until I found myself in a situation for which I was not equipped. It took me a long time to realize that part of my handicap at this stage was being too advanced. By having met my weaknesses and shortcomings I had become stronger and wiser than most people who simply refused to admit to human frailty. I kept thinking I was wrong because I didn’t fit in but it was still the same old world that didn’t make sense.

There were practical problems that hit me left and right How to explain that blank in my resume when applying for a job. Say that I was off on independent study in some remote place or tell the truth and risk losing out on the job? Getting a driver’s licence, opening a bank account, getting references to rent a flat — meeting new people, especially dating, I always wondered if I should tell the story or not If I didn’t tell it, I would remain a stranger and if I did, I’d have to tell the whole thing knowing that when I’d finished, the person was not likely to have changed his view that cults are harmless groups of people who are better off where they are. When I was speaking to groups in New York, the people had been friendly because they pitied me. Now I was learning that no one really understood.

One of my old friends invited me to a high school reunion party. I mingled: a singer, a local politician, a craftsman, a journalist One woman arrived late. The talk quieted down as she made her entrance and hellos. ‘Sorry I’m late, guys. You’ll never believe what held me up. I stopped at a gas station and some Moonie came up trying to sell me flowers!’

The whole room burst into laughter. I looked down at my drink. The girl I’d been talking to turned to resume the conversation. ‘And what have you been up to since I last saw you, Erica?’

The thing that got me most upset was when people asked why I had become a Moonie and then didn’t notice at all how uncomfortable I was in answering. They’d never think to ask in casual conversation, tell us about how you became a quadriplegic in your motorcycle accident or tell us about watching your best friend get blown to bits in Vietnam and, oh, pass the chips, won’t you?

I found out that my brother had tried to foil the deprogramming. He thought my mother was over-reacting and shouldn’t treat me like a baby by bailing me out of trouble. He thought it was a fad, a phase I’d pass through. He wanted to phone me at the camp to tip me off to get out before she came to get me. Luckily, he wasn’t motivated enough to follow through. When I saw him, I asked him about it He scoffed at the idea that I had been brainwashed. Okay, big brother, what if you are right and I had just happened to, say, be into self-mutilation and your little plan had worked? He was unmoved. According to him, my great failing was that I just hadn’t been cool, hadn’t been doing the in thing, something I was still guilty of. I decided, after a time, to put my thoughts to him in a letter. The letter came back to me. He had scrawled across it ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue ...’ from the rhyme we used to taunt each other with as children ‘… anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you’. Welcome home, sis.

Surely someone would understand. I went to speak to a rabbi who reduced me to tears by ridiculing me for having toyed with Christianity and then to a minister who said I would have never become a Moonie if I had studied Christianity better. Father Peter was too embarrassed to discuss it I was barking up the wrong tree. It wasn’t a religious problem but a psychological one.

I finally came across a lukewarm article on the subject in an obscure publication and wrote to the author. He referred me to the only person he knew who had any knowledge of cults. I went to see this professor and gladly consented to having our talk taped for use in his book. A totally misleading sliver of one of my remarks later appeared in a Moonie PR book. I then heard that this professor was on Moon’s payroll as a functionary at the annual international conference that a Dr Moon with eyeglasses hosts for eminent scientists.

After the Jonestown tragedy, an informational hearing was called in Washington, DC. The Moonie campaign to have the event cancelled did not succeed but they pressured enough that the Moonie president was called to testify and ex-members were not.

Hundreds of Moonies had the place mobbed by dawn. A friend, fearing for my safety, got me into the hearing room before the doors were opened to the public. First the press came in, bright lights, scuffle, equipment being set up, the sound of people filling up the room behind me and then a peculiar and familiar stench. That smell I could never get rid of on the fundraising team. I turned around and saw the entire hall filled with Moonies. As people stood in turn to give their presentations, the Moonies jeered, stomped their feet, hurled insults. Security guards, panelists, press all stiffened at the unpredictability of this confrontation. Wasn’t it the right of a governing body to gather information after the assassination of a congressmen and the death of over 900 others? How many were the Moonies willing to sacrifice to protect themselves? One of the ex-cultists prevented from testifying who had lost her tiny son in the suicide-massacre shook like a leaf when the Moonie president spoke in her stead. The Moonies rose as a man with a deafening cheer.

I wasn’t going to hang around. I pushed my way through the knotted crowd towards a side exit. Almost there but someone was blocking my path. I tapped his shoulder to move him aside. He spun around and faced me. Baum.

‘Erica, it’s-so-good-to-see-you, we’ve-been-so-worried-about-you.’

Yeah, so worried you’ve been losing sleep thinking what deprogrammed fundraisers will do to Moon’s bank account. I tried to step past He kept talking so fast he was spitting.

‘Listen, Sister, I-know-that-you-think-I’m-possessed-by-evil-spirits and we-think-that-you’re-possessed-by-evil-spirits, but-that-doesn’t-mean-that —’

‘Bob,’ I luxuriated in the heresy of addressing him like that and putting my hand on his shoulder, ‘I don’t believe in evil spirits.’

‘What?’ He took in a sharp breath and seemed to grow visibly larger with disbelief and indignation. ‘Well... don’t you believe in God?’ He had on a red and white pinstripe shirt that had an odd optical effect of making him seem to vibrate all the more.

‘You mean a person can’t believe in God without believing in little invisible things running around that make people open their wallets and fall asleep on the highway?’

I still love you, Bob, but not in a way you could understand. Not because doctrine says I must, not to show how super-spiritual I am.

‘I know you weren’t one of those jeering and stomping your feet You were always dignified and knew to turn the other cheek.’

His smile caught me off guard. Then I checked the eyes. They were blazing. ‘Oh, no. Oh, no.’ His head bobbled. ‘Things have changed. The time has come. The course has changed from a passive one to one of aggression. We’re on the offensive now.’

All the times Moon had spoken about military aggression. All the times we listened with our lids fluttering closed, as he droned on in his hypnotic way, punctuating with militaristic words, of battle, of enemy, of charging and crushing, defeating, subjugating, annihilating, of taking over the government, the United Nations, the whole world. Baum had me by both arms. I looked toward the door, searching wildly for a face I knew. Two friends spotted me. They flanked me and moved me through the door into an empty corridor. Baum ran after me, shouting, dancing to himself, trying to pry one of the men loose.

‘Leave her alone, Baum, can’t you see she doesn’t want to talk to you?’

‘Never mind that. You have to answer to a few things, Erica. What about this article in Newsweek? Why did you lie, Erica? Why are you saying things about us that you know aren’t true? You can’t do that, you can’t get away with it.’ He had his lips peeled back, lunging forward at every question. What did he intend to do about it? The press had already gone for the story about suicide training in the Moonies, about members being taught how to slash their wrists. Ex-members everywhere were crawling out of the woodwork. I wasn’t the only one talking.

Off the corridor behind one of the endless unmarked doors we stood. We’d ditched Baum. I was shaking. I sank into a chair.

I was shaking because I knew that but for a flick of fate, Baum and I could have traded places.

And by that same fate I had once been a model Moonie, a hard-liner like Baum. Would I not have made a model Nazi? Had not both the victim and the victimizer lived within me? Was I not now cast out forever from the innocence I once enjoyed? Moon had held out the forbidden fruit and my eyes had been opened to know good and evil.

#FFWPU #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Moonies #Unification Church #Sun Myung Moon #Erica Heftmann

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sethnakht · 6 years

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Im at work and just had a thought but no one talks Star wars so ill ask you :) when Vader says to Palps in rotl he says MY son is with them. Why do you think palpatine allowed this so to speak, instead of going into the the whole anakin is dead spiel? I always thiught it was odd

Good question! I think the number of interpretations here is probably endless – but will try and put down a few possibilities.

How one interprets the “my son” line depends perhaps most on how one interprets the conversation Vader has with Palpatine in ESB, where we see them speaking about Luke for the first time. This conversation exists in two versions: one produced when there was a definite interest in keeping the “I am your father” reveal a surprise until the end of the film, and the Ian McDiarmid one from the Special Edition, produced at a time when that cat was well out of its bag. I’ve put both versions here together, crossing out what was eliminated for the Special Edition and bolding the new formulations.

VADER: What is thy bidding, my Master?

EMPEROR: There is a great disturbance in the Force.

VADER: I have felt it.

EMPEROR: We have a new enemy, Luke Skywalker. The young rebel who destroyed the Death Star. I have no doubt this boy is the offspring of Anakin Skywalker.

VADER: Yes, my Master. How is that possible?

EMPEROR: Search your feelings, Lord Vader; you will know it to be true. He could destroy us.

VADER: He is just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him.

EMPEROR: The Force is strong with him. The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.

VADER: If he could be turned he would become a powerful ally.

EMPEROR: Yes. Yes. He would be a great asset. Can it be done?

VADER: He will join us or die, Master.

In the original conversation, the conversation that most importantly was the one in place when RotJ was filmed, the Emperor names Luke. He has a name for the “new enemy”. He also notes that Luke is the “son of Skywalker”. It’s unclear whether he knows that Vader has been pursuing Luke all this time - in the original 1976 novelization, the Emperor was cloistered away from the world, essentially a puppet - or whether he is telling Vader here that he has caught onto his treacherous schemes. He could also just be saying that the disturbance he felt was so terrifying, it has made Luke’s capture or death imperative. As the Emperor insists Luke is a threat, Vader responds with mollifying, calm suggestions (“He is just a boy” line and “If he could be turned”). Vader’s reference to Obi-Wan could even suggest that they have spoken about Luke before.

But the salient point here is that the Emperor calls Luke the “son of Skywalker” Why does the Emperor say “son of Skywalker” instead of “your son”? While Watsonian readings are certainly possible, I read this as a dramatic necessity. The film hinges on its twist ending. “Son of Skywalker” is vague and formal and foreboding and above all, it doesn’t give the game away mid-film. Can you imagine the impact of “I am your father” if the Emperor had already casually revealed Luke’s parentage to the audience in a random conference call?

For Watsonian readings, of course, the newer version is more relevant. Notably, this version doesn’t include Luke’s name. This leaves unclear how the Emperor came to zero in on “the young rebel” - whether he saw him in a vision, or has been observing Vader long enough to put two and two together, or something else. It also allows one to read him as pretending surprise (along the lines of: I thought your spawn was dead too, never knew of him before the Force showed him to me, don’t even know his name). Vader also pretends to have never heard of Luke Skywalker before. Otherwise, the dialogue remains unchanged, which could be attributed to laziness, a desire to keep the twist ending intact for those who see the film for a first time and have not yet watched the PT, or some sort of manipulative game in which the Emperor insists that Anakin and Vader must be regarded as two separate people, etc.

Something I think one has to consider in this context is how these films were made. A version of this conversation was already in the original draft of the film, when Vader and Anakin were still in fact distinct people (Anakin appears to Luke as a Force ghost). Basically, Vader reaches out into the Force while in his castle full of gargoyles and encounters Luke, creating a disturbance that the Emperor apparently also feels. Instead of the conversation we eventually got in the film, the Emperor appears “draped and hooded in cloth-of-gold, so that we cannot see his face” but so that we nonetheless understand him to be powerful. Vader bows before the image and has the following conversation:

Vader’s breathing reveals his “fear of the Emperor”. He also angrily knocks over a golden bowl, frightening the gargoyles. Most interestingly, “Skywalker” is a known factor to both of them. Vader also makes no attempt to change the Emperor’s mind; he isn't exactly given the opportunity. My point being that a lot of things were in flux when the films were made, and that the back and forth between them becomes less and less about external threats than mind games with each iteration.

As for RotJ – the fact that Vader refers to Luke as “my son”, placing emphasis on these words, is something that I think opens itself up for a great deal of interpretation, especially since Palpatine immediately questions him on whether his “feelings are clear” on the matter. But I don’t myself read that exchange as evidence that Palpatine insists on a sharp divide between Vader and Anakin, that he thinks them two different people. RotJ was of course filmed before the PT, so there are inconsistencies. But the PT doesn’t suggest this interpretation to me either. I’m not sure such petty external policing would fit with Palpatine’s self-presentation as someone beyond conventional distinctions ( “Good is a point of view, Anakin”, “Keep your mind clear of assumptions. The fear of losing power is a weakness of both the Jedi and the Sith”, etc. ) Certainly Palpatine insists on using the Sith name he has given Vader, and puts Vader in the suit, and in the newer comics, encourages him to identify with that trapping. Certainly Palpatine is manipulative and perverse. And certainly Vader has no interest in being referred to as Anakin.

But Darth Vader exists because he was willing to sell his soul to save his wife (and possibly also his unborn child). Whether you consider the newer comics and novels (Lords of the Sith) canon or not, they are evidence for a reading where Palpatine exerts control over Vader not least by constantly goading him into confronting his past choices. Each time Palpatine does this - sending Vader to Mustafar, where he was not only defeated but also killed Padmé, to build his Sith lightsaber, giving him Padmé’s ship, ordering him to kidnap the babies of former Jedi, forcing Vader to admit he was a traitor - Vader reaffirms those choices, choosing the Dark, refusing alternatives. Palpatine also approves of Vader’s desires to “find” (resurrect?) Padmé on Mustafar, or at least he claims to do so on the grounds that Vader will learn much and become more powerful in the process.

I’ve gone on so long already, I should stop rambling! Last thing - I do think Vader’s words in RotJ are extraordinary, of a different character from the EU examples above, not least because he’s speaking of the future rather than a dead past, claiming a future instead of remaining in his little loop. But the difference seems to me a subtle one, if that makes sense? He’s changed his drives, in Westworld-speak: the form and direction of his purpose has changed, giving new meaning to something Palpatine could once take for granted (Anakin = Vader) as a means of control.

Thanks for the ask, dear friend!

#asks #shiro-tora3 #long post #darth vader #wild speculation #sorry this took so long #and is not especially coherent #i've been in disseration land #and it removes my ability to speak or remember #would love to know how you read this yourself and chat about this more!

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sinesalvatorem · 6 years

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Dancing Through Life

It’s quite possible that I learned more yesterday than in any other day of my life. However, one of the things I learned was that compressing information is an important part of life, so I’m going to try writing down a couple of the highlight realisations.

So, the day before yesterday, I realised that my stims were an important feature of my cognition. That they contained information produced by the process of me thinking, in much the same way that the verbal thoughts and mental images I experience are. In fact, the external movements are just as fundamentally important to thinking as the internal dialogue is.

I’ve always had a sense that something was missing, cognitively. That, even though I can in theory think quite fast, I was missing all the memory I should have available for processing those thoughts. I didn’t have enough registers to store the complex structures I was coming up with. I couldn’t put a thought down or I might never find it again. I was stuck.

Yesterday I found those registers. It turns out that entire complex action patterns can be compressed and stored as a series of muscle pulses - a sort of bitecode for the body. If I was stimming, I could hold a consistent pattern of these pulses over time, meaning I could remember a thought for longer even when it exited my verbal awareness. At no point yesterday did I explicitly notice that this was how to describe what was happening, but that’s what I was using to function.

I’ve long known I can’t think well when I don’t walk a lot. In fact, it can typically make the difference between depression and vitality. Earlier this week, I was feeling really down about not talking to people, but this turned out to be pretty much just my not going out walking in the sunshine while I had the cold. The moment I did that again, my mental skies cleared. It’s amazing how demonstrably biological of a system we are.

And part of this is how we store so much of our lives in muscle memory. I can type this whole essay despite being dyslexic because I have automatic patterns firing to tell me where to place my fingers on the keyboard. I don’t even look. Which is valuable, because it means I can do this really quickly, much like all the other habitual behaviours in my life.

While I wondered through the hills and valleys of San Francisco, I confidently offloaded various cognitive tasks to my low-level muscle patterns. They’re nowhere near as fast as my conscious mind, but they get the job done. When I wanted to go home, I just set an intention of going home and then tossed the thought to the side, allowing my legs to bring me home.

By dancing through my day, I was able to learn way more than I ever have before, because I could actually remember the things I picked up and bring them back for later. It was no longer a desperate race to figure out what the Most Important Thought was and pursue it and not squander this moment. I could set things aside, confident I could reach back out and pluck them again.

I finally felt abundance mindset down to the bone. I finally knew that, yes, I really do have everything I could ever need. Up in the hills surrounding Daly City, I became a G-d. And, having achieved that, I finally got some perspective.

For one thing, I realised I was safe. When I truly saw what the peak of healthy human cognition was - running and leaping across the savanna with rippling waves of muscle and thought - I realised that I vastly outclassed anything that could threaten me. I pretty much lost my fear of dogs, learned when I was chased by one as a kid. I wondered into nature and danced with the trees and tried to learn from the rhythms of ecology.

A very very lossy approximation of the complicated thing I realised up there is that I concluded I was immortal. This is an incorrect summary, but as a model it brings you some useful places. Let’s say I’m an information-processing system that gains value from creating pretty patterns - and I just learned I’m immortal. What does that mean to me?

For one, an end to scarcity. All my life, I’ve lived in a conscious state of deprivation. Of there not being enough oxygen in here. A lot of this was due to other people - people who hurt me if I acted weird, with the stimming being a part of that. People who forced me to do work of their desire, preventing me from controlling my own time. People who controlled how far I could walk and what I could investigate. Not allowing me inputs or space to process.

But the thing that matters to me is that the pretty patterns be instantiated. That the Good be actualised. It doesn’t actually matter when fundamentally. The constraints on what kind of patterns I’ll make (ie, impacts on the world in general) can all kind of be taken as one measure of how much room there is to operate in.

I felt scarcity because I felt like I would never be given enough breathing room to do something meaningful. I was also basically convinced I was going to be killed by someone at some point soon, so I didn’t think I had the space to make something deep and great.

My biggest fear was of being a failed child prodigy - because I just had no faith in being around to be an adult success. At 13 I started working on the Riemann Hypothesis, on the assumption that realistically I had 5 years left to do something Great before I got kicked out on the street and died. All of that melted away. I could see myself living on long enough to make any amount of building for tomorrow worthwhile.

I also learned a lot about what scarcity can do to someone.

There are various patterns that we perceive as pleasant. Symmetries are a good example. More complex patterns which still manage to be technically correct are generally perceived as more pleasant, but they have the downside of requiring more room - both in space and time. If you think you don’t have that, it makes sense to instead make a small and simple pattern, and then just repeat it a lot to get more pleasure.

Thus, if you don’t have much concern for tomorrow, you should sink everything into creating pleasure now. Mood-altering drugs! Risky sex! Thrill-seeking crimes! All the attractions of nihilistic teenagers are the universal attractors of a foreshortened future - I’m going out soon, so might as well go out with the best rush I can get my hands on.

This was also plain from the dance of the drug addicts I saw on the sidewalk while out. Except, well, they didn’t dance - they couldn’t. What I observed were their muscle movements, which generally consisted of strained forward motion while beset by extremely simple and repetitive ticks in various muscle groups. The worse their condition, the more muscle groups were in rebellion, and the more dissonant they were, until the individual was effectively beating himself up. (Yes, it was always men this far gone.)

The pattern of internal rebellion is fundamentally a product of lack of internal trust and of long-term rhythms, without which your muscles can’t coordinate except sporadically. In some biological sense, your muscles “want” the release of relaxing tension. If you keep a muscle tensed at all times, out of almost a lack of concern for the well being of your parts, it will decide you are a tyrant and try to overthrow you.

We often imagine ourselves grand sovereigns of our bodies, but this is an illusion of top-down order and mastery. Your cells have been forged together in a pact of trust and cooperation by evolution’s insistence that they’re better off together than alone. If you don’t act in such a way that every cell is, to a first approximation, benefited by the union, then pockets of mutiny will form - from chronic pain to cancer.

Oh, and most systems are like this. Is your psyche broken, warped, or in internal upheaval? Well, have you been living a life such that all your psychological drives feel attended to? If not, then no wonder some are trying to yank the steering wheel! Apply this lens appropriately to politics, economics, Trump, Brexit, and any items you own that might be in disrepair.

This post is just scratching the surface, but I think this is a reasonable summary of what I learned. Not at all because it contains what I learned, but because I think it conveys a detailed enough prescription that someone who followed this through could probably unravel the rest of what was worth mentioning. If you can also clear as much of the fog as I did by dancing your own dance, you too can see what I did up on that hill.

Which is why I’d really like to teach dance classes at some point, if there are interested local folks. Not, like, a specific style of dance - I’ve never learned a style of dance myself. I just mean helping people navigate the internal obstacles that prevent letting your thoughts flow into your muscles, since I now have a great deal of introspective access to the psychology of doing so. And, hopefully, I can give a hand to people in expanding more fully into themselves.

Today I’ve been completely refreshed. I’ve woken up into a life that has meaning and structure eons long. The beat of my longest period of oscillation is so slow that I have no urgent want for anything. Everything can be given over to its proper time and place, and it will come back around when next it’s needed. The ships I send out come home to dock. I can always trust my loose ends to be wrapped up by the time I’m done.

#amateur self psychology #heroic growth arc #long post cw #mother visible

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merryfae · 7 years

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Yall mind if I rant: The Sequel Nobody Wanted

The newest comic got me to question my stance on Korra/sami yet again (the dashes here exist to keep it out of the tags, just in case that’s still a problem). The short version of this is that my stance really hasn’t changed. (Also, just a headsup, I haven’t read my old anti k/s post in a long time, but it’s probably full of logical fallacies and the lot, so…what I’m getting at here is please don’t judge me based on what I’ve written in the past).

I remember when I loved LOK. Book 1, I was able to look past the flaws, because the tension, characters, and atmosphere was so good. Book 2, the flaws became harder to overlook, but the Avatar Wan episode was definitely an experience. Book 3 was an entirely solid outing, though I missed some of that original atmosphere from Book 1. And then Book 4. I was so excited for the finale, because Book 4, despite its flaws, had been pretty great. But through the majority of the finale I was thinking to myself, “is that it?” Like, don’t get me wrong, there were some good fight scenes between Korra and Kuvira, and Mako’s sacrifice was pretty powerful, but most of it was underwhelming. It felt less like a wrap up of the show, and more like a wrap up of that season. Nothing from past seasons really tied together with the exception of the spirit portal. Plot elements from past seasons that could have been integrated into the show were dropped altogether. I don’t know. It was disappointing.

So I was already in a bad mood, and the entire ending with Korra//sami kind of killed it even more for me. Because representation is important, no doubt. I push for it a lot myself. But not when it impedes the storytelling. The storytelling of LOK? Didn’t warrant it. This is coming from someone who, at the start of Book 3, loved the idea of Korra/sami. Their interaction in the car? Adorable. Asami sparring with Korra? Great. But there was nothing in future episodes to build up to a romantic conclusion. There was a scene where Korra blushed when receiving a complement from Asami. That’s the only scene between Korra and Asami that implied romantic intent. That and Mako’s whole, “What is with you two???” thing when they all go out for lunch, but goodness, if that wasn’t the most forced, inconsequential conflict I’ve seen in this series. I mean, if you have to tell the audience that there’s something going on between these characters instead of showing us, maybe there’s a reason a portion of your audience didn’t latch on to your intent.

The problem with every scene where Asami and Korra interact (aside from the fact that they don’t bond over internal, character-building struggles, and instead just solve external problems together) is that most scenes are just Asami supporting Korra emotionally. Which, okay, for another character, that could imply romance. However, Asami’s character is already naturally caring and nurturing. She was already a character who was entirely supportive of the rest of the cast, so it’s no stretch of the imagination by any means to view her supporting Korra with tea or her offering intimate support when Korra is devastated in the Book 3 finale as inherently platonic. And, given that she was a support figure already, Korra sending her letters that the others “wouldn’t understand” can likewise read as platonic. This would be different if a character like, say, Opal interacted with Korra in similar ways after her introduction, a character who did not exist to offer unconditional support to our main leads already throughout the show, and whom Korra alternatively exhibits support for in Book 3 (or maybe I just really like their air bending scene together. I don’t know. Don’t hold me to that one). And that covers basically all of Korra and Asami’s interactions – Asami offering Korra support, and Korra accepting (usually) that support. That is, aside from those short (very short) but sweet moments at the beginning of Book 3. Plus, Book 4 takes place after a years-long gap as well, so the fact that we’re only shown them interacting once outside of the finale in Book 4 really speaks volumes. Which is not to mention that, aside from that last scene they have together, they hardly interact in the finale at all. I wanted to like this ship. I really, really did. But not when the writing didn’t add up.

And then there’s the fact that Bryke’s claims that Korra/sami was intended from the beginning are obviously false. I mean, they’re on record saying that after Book 2, relationship drama had come to an end, and they were ready to focus on friendship. If I remember correctly, the voice actors had to be called back in after the finale had already been finished in order to include that last scene with Korra and Asami. It was literally last minute.

It certainly doesn’t help that I dislike basically every ship in LOK. I never liked B/opal either. I didn’t like M/asmi, and Ma/korra didn’t have the best development itself. Honestly, I don’t think Bryke are good at writing romance period. But I’m angrier about Korra/sami, because not only is it a relationship involving the show’s main character, but it’s the central focus of the scene that ended the entire show. Say what you want about Kat/aang, but at least that ship was planned and introduced beyond minimal amounts of subtext from day one. It was a consistent part of the story. And alternatively, if LOK had ended with Ma/korra like it did in Book 1, I wouldn’t be necessarily pleased with it, but at least there was a textual history there between the two.

And I hear the arguments about how Bryke couldn’t include textual evidence of Korra/sami because it was a ship between two women. Okay, point taken. I mean, they did admit that they didn’t even bother asking Nick until last minute, but I digress. But jeez, you could at least develop their relationship a bit, couldn’t you? Again, the only conflicts these two face together are external ones. Korra and Asami fight a gang. Asami carries Korra away from danger while Mako and Bolin fight off baddies. Korra and Asami escape/crash/rebuild an airship. In none of these scenes together do they have any meaningful interactions. Maybe you could count Korra grinning at Asami for two seconds while they rebuild the airship. Maybe. But they don’t bond over anything or talk about anything except what’s happening to them at the hands of outside forces (or essentially, what’s relevant to the plot). Hence why Asami’s offer of unconditional support of Korra in the Book 3 finale rings a little hollow. It’s just Asami doing what she’s been doing the whole time, albeit with a more emotional framing.

And all this could all lead me to explaining why I didn’t like the conclusion of Korra’s character arc, or why I didn’t like how Asami was essentially a plot device until Book 3, and even then, she wasn’t given any real development. (In fact, I’m actually kind of bitter that the show didn’t write Asami better. Her entire character basically revolved around A) the love triangle nonsense or B) her father/company). But if I were to go in depth with that, it’d take another thousand or so words, and I’m amazed I even had the drive to write this whole thing in the first place. In short, the show really is a mess.

Now, I’m only writing all this because I’ve seen panels from the comic. The first few panels I saw, I figured I shouldn’t judge too harshly. I didn’t see enough of the actual comic to draw a conclusion. But with the new ones out, it’s safe to say that the comic seems relatively out of character for both Korra and Asami. Seriously, maybe one sentence in there sounded like it could come from Korra. I implore you all to switch the dialogue and pretend Korra is saying Asami’s lines, and Asami is saying Korra’s. Do you feel the character-charged dialogue? Me neither. And anywho, I’m a bit frustrated people are hailing Korra/sami as the epitome of representation when it’s really…not. It’s hard seeing Korra develop into a nearly unrecognizable character for me, because she was the saving grace of the show from day one.

Korra/sami isn’t the only ship that’s frustrated me like this. I downright despise several forced ships in fictional media, especially when it’s detrimental to a character’s development. I didn’t like J/ashi from Samurai Jack. Krist/anna or Kristoff/anna or whatever the heck it’s called from Frozen was pretty awful. Several Marvel movies (of which I am a fan) have awful romance subplots (Sta/ron and Bruce/nat are the biggest offenders). At the end of the day, Korra/sami isn’t the biggest offender. It does offer quality bi representation between two WOC. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Go ahead and enjoy your ooc comics folks. Who knows. Maybe it’ll actually be good.

#anti korrasami #anti bryke #shipping nonsense #i really hope i don't come off as pretentious #as i gain more confidence i'm always worried about asserting myself #do i sound like a jerk?#also #my inbox is open so if you wanna have some polite discourse #hit me up #also also #did i write this whole thing only for no one to read it?#yes yes i did #and a headsup #i didn't write this out of anger #i wrote this because i love fictional analysis #this honestly started off as a one paragraph thing that i wasn't planning on posting #but i had so much fun i ended writing a bajillion words

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feministangertranslator · 6 years

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The Daily Deluge

Image from Femstella

Bombshells big and small are being dropped daily as the result of the #metoo movement. I feel disappointed I don't have more hours in the day to read every tidbit of news about what is shaping up to be another major chapter in feminism, let alone sit down, process, and write about my perspective on it. I really wanted to have written more here by now. I am so busy loving the smell the Napalm in the morning, it’s hard to get much of anything else done. Sometimes I want to call in sick to everything and everybody, make a bowl of popcorn and watch the patriarchy burn down from the comfort of my cozy home. Honestly, I could eat this shit up all day and don’t want to miss a minute of it.

This, unfortunately, leads me to often find myself in ravenous consumption mode as opposed to thoughtful and deliberate output mode: I am devouring all of the news of the men who have been accused of sexual misconduct and their (mostly ridiculous) statements - I’m not even going to call those PR and attorney crafted liability avoiders apologies. Equally, I enjoy all of the beautiful heart-filled articles, posts, and videos from other survivors of sexual assault who are expressing reactions, thoughts, and feelings to which I strongly relate. I have a docket of saved articles in my Facebook account, tons of bookmarked Instagram posts, and cued up podcasts competing for my attention. I have to force myself to pull out of the social media rabbit hole, get up and away from my computer (sometimes TV) to go brush my teeth, straighten my hair, put food in my mouth, earn money, and do other things that are vital to taking care of myself. They seem so much more boring in comparison to the day of reckoning that seems to be unfolding right before my eyes.

I must resist this siren call for a few reasons. Firstly, I know this is the position our capitalist society wants me in: too busy watching, ingesting, consuming, buying, and promoting the ideas and goods being peddled by others to get angry about all the more important injustices and inequities from the fallout of capitalism befalling me and the rest of us. Fuck that. That is one of the reasons why I stopped working in television. I couldn't imagine myself working so hard to be (if I were so lucky) a part of a successful show; at the end of the day, even the best creation will always be an opiate of the people to me.

Whether it is the thoughts, theories, or products of others, like most of us Americans, I have been trained to consume and have reveled in it for too long. (My family is Romanian and I can definitely see the difference in some of our shopping and lifestyle habits). And I want to use my time, energy, effort, voice and dollars to only support who and what I believe in, and what will support and sustain me. It’s not just money that I have to be concerned with, it’s time and energy - which frankly, are more precious, and affect me, my psyche and actions, and therefore my life, tremendously.

What I choose to consume has to have the purpose either to benefit, uplift or inspire me, too. Because I am also dying to create and share I have to be mindful to not overconsume to numb myself out and satiate the fire inside me to make stuff. While part of me wants America to take a few cues from the Nordic market economy model or conversely maybe give Libertarianism a real shot, American capitalism can obviously work for others, albeit a select handful. So I have to believe I am also worthy of a piece of that pie, and there has to be a market for what I have to offer.

For example, I find myself obsessing about the Roy Moore story. I need to constantly remind myself that paying too much attention to him and Leigh Corfman, with whom I identify with strongly who was brave enough to shed light on how he molested her by grooming and taking advantage of her, at some point puts me in the observer and consumer mode. If I’m not careful, the contact high I get from her beautiful inspired acts can placate me enough to detract from what I can do for myself, too. It is definitely easier to watch her do it than to put myself out on a limb in the public eye, even though I passionately want to get out there myself.

As a woman who was at many points throughout my childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood silenced through intimidation and abuse, I must heed the call to speak up and let it surpass my urge to stay comfortable and quiet because I think it will keep me “safe.” I must constantly fight the further ingrained notion that others (especially men) know better than me. That I’m not worthy of listening to. Or that I don’t know quite enough yet to open my mouth. This has plagued me for years - despite getting an English degree from America’s top public university, making it through the ringer to become a licensed attorney in one of the most difficult states to pass the bar, ranking obscenely high in verbal ability on an IQ test, doing well at public speaking in some of my jobs, and even breaking into difficult industries and making multiple career changes.

External achievements are no match against a deeply long-held belief that I am only here to serve others, and my life, safety, comfort, and opinions don’t matter. It would follow and haunt me in every job or relationship I had. I truly believe it started with experiencing many “adverse childhood experiences,” specifically being sexually abused by someone in my family who was supposed to take care of me instead of use and abuse me. This, of course, set me up for many years of unconsciously repeating that dynamic in a lot of my other relationships and further cementing this completely false belief as a “truth” for me. I know this is why it is important for me to speak now. It is the antidote to all my internalized shame, hatred and anger. That was someone else’s bullshit, dysfunction and pain put upon me, and I don’t want it anymore. And if anything I say can help someone else stop putting up with it, too, it will all be worth it.

I know I am not fully ready to say or act upon all that I have weighing on my heart and mind yet. Because I am insanely jealous of the output of others who are, I know I will do it, too. I have to make small steps that work for me, be patient, and hold onto my knowing I will get there when it is my time. As Julia Cameron said in the Artist Way, jealousy is a roadmap; to paraphrase in my terms, its purpose is to tell you where you want to go, what you want to do, and who you want to be by making you so fucking mad when you see someone else is doing it and you are not. It’s that simple.

I know why I am a bit hesitant to say what I truly feel, talk about my own experiences, and make myself vulnerable to judgment. It is way easier to read something someone else did and share it with a quick comment on social media as opposed to say and create something from my own heart. There is less of my skin in the game. And the game of speaking out about feminism and sexual abuse and assault? I already know what the rules are. When women publicly speak out about anything related to women’s rights, people (almost all of them men) systematically call them fat and ugly and threaten to rape and kill them. They try to silence them by attacking their womanhood: their looks (what society has deemed a woman’s hottest commodity), their sense of emotional and personal safety (through means of violating the anatomical vulnerability of their genitals in comparison to men’s), their actual lives (murder, duh), and if that isn’t enough, their straight up worthiness of being alive (by making them feel unattractive, unsafe, unloved, unwanted, unintelligent, unworthy and ultimately emotionally annihilated). For a woman not up to withstanding that attack, the threatening perpetrator doesn’t have to actually follow through on his threat; his words and fear they create are enough. Men systemically perpetrating violence against women is alive and well in our culture and we all know it.

Wielding the power to drum up fear of personal attack or violence is the main tool used to control women and it can be incredibly effective against one who has already experienced such awful acts. And words can be just as powerful as actions in affecting someone’s sense of safety. These trolls know that. That’s exactly what Trump did to Rosie O’Donnell when he called her awful names and whatever else he has done to other women who ruffle his delicate feathers. A woman who has experienced that attack and/or violence firsthand has to be able to do a lot of work to come to the other side of it to feel free walking down the street safely, and even more so to be brave enough to talk about such controversial subjects in the public eye. So since I already know what the rules of the game are, I am in the process of deciding how I and when I want to play it, what I need to strengthen, and equipment I need to bring with me to make sure I come out of it victorious and intact.

#metoo #stopsexualviolence #feminist #feminism #hollywood #politics #womensrights #womensrevolution #rapeculture #boysclub

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1nebest · 6 years

Link

Upgrade tells the story of a Grey Trace, a man in the near future who’s left quadriplegic after a car accident and mugging.

Following an interlude that sees Grey struggling with his new disability, an experimental computer chip called Stem is placed in his spinal cord, which it doesn’t just allow him control of his limbs again — it turns him into something close to a superhero, ready to track down the men who paralyzed him and murdered his wife.

The film, which comes out today in the United States, may sound like a straightforward revenge plot, but it was written and directed by Leigh Wannell, who’s best known for writing Saw and Insidious. (More recently, he made his directorial debut with Insidious 3.) He explained that he wasn’t interested in turning this into a superhero movie. Instead, he wanted to tell the “Taxi Driver version” of this story.

Without getting into details, it’s fair to say that Upgrade doesn’t feel that far removed from Wannell’s horror films. It also includes plenty of visceral action scenes and touches on bigger questions about our relationship with technology.

I met with Wannell in New York City last week to discuss the film, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows. There’s one passage that gets a little spoiler-y, but I’ll warn you so you can skip ahead.

Wannell shot Upgrade in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, so we started off by talking about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne.

Leigh Wannell

Leigh Wannell: I’ve lived in L.A. for 12 years now, so I no longer care about Sydney-Melbourne. We shot this film in Melbourne but we actually edited in Sydney.

I was in Sydney for a few months and I absolutely loved it. I insisted on living in an apartment on Bondi Beach, which was not practical at all to the location of the editing room, but I didn’t care because I was like, “Look, if I was going to walk on ice, then I’m going to tap dance.” If I’m going to live in Sydney, I want to live on Bondi Beach.

TechCrunch: So the big science fictional idea of Stem, where did that come from?

Wannell: The idea really just came into my head, the way all my ideas do. It’s a very random process, and in its randomness it’s frustrating, because I feel like I’m always trying to think of movie ideas. And most of the ideas aren’t good, and they instantly get filed away in the drawer for terrible ideas.

Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I’m driving or I’m in the shower, you’ll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn’t have to be much, it doesn’t have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won’t leave your head and that’s when you know you’ve got something.

That’s how this started. It wasn’t like I read a magazine article about where tech is going. I was in my backyard, I remember that, and it was a nice day like this, and I just suddenly had this image of a quadriplegic in a wheelchair who stood up out of the chair and was being controlled from the neck down by a computer. That image and that scenario wouldn’t leave my head and I started reverse engineering a story into it. I kept writing away and making notes and then, cut to many years later, I’m sitting here talking with you.

TechCrunch: It’s interesting that it came from your imagination, because in some ways it feels very prescient. We had our own robotics event a couple of weeks ago and one of the big moments on-stage was someone in a wheelchair who was able to take a few steps thanks to an exoskeleton.

Wannell: So the exoskeleton that helps people with paralysis walk and move, this movie is the internalized version of that, where it goes one step further and there’s nothing exterior. It’s a chip.

It has been interesting to watch the world catch up to my script. Because when I wrote the first draft of this script, automated cars and smart kitchens were still science fiction. And in the ensuing years, they’ve become ubiquitous. I mean, my wife’s car parks itself and talks to her. And my daughter thinks it’s perfectly normal to have a voice talking to her in the kitchen, and she asks it to play songs and it does. So in a way I feel like I’m living in the world of the movie I wrote all those years ago.

TechCrunch: And when was that?

Wannell: God, the first draft was probably at least six years ago.

TechCrunch: You said a lot of ideas will come to you, and you’ll think: Some of these are bad, some of these are good. Obviously, you’re known for horror, so in this case, when you think of a science fiction idea, does that create any trepidation?

Wannell: There was a bit of trepidation on my part as I was gearing up to direct the movie. Not so much when I was writing it. But I started to worry about science fiction fans because I’m very well-versed with horror fans, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of them, I feel like I’m in that community, and I was a horror fan myself. But I realized that science fiction has its own community of these staunch fans who pick apart things like Star Trek and Star Wars. And I did remember having a moment where I thought, wow, are they going to see this and think that I’m a fraud, that I’m a tourist in this world?

I’ve just gone through a two week trip around the country, screening the movie in different cities, and afterwards I’ll always chat to people. And in the acceptance of the movie, I realize that these genres, they’re not the province of any one type of person. What I feel like science fiction fans respond to is just people trying to hit them with something new, something they haven’t seen. And if you do that you’ll be okay.

TechCrunch: When you were directing, did you feel like you were using a different skillset?

Wannell: The mechanics of making a horror film are so specific that I obviously wasn’t using any of that. Those quiet moments in a horror film where you really lean on the anticipation of things, this movie wasn’t using any of that. But I felt like some of the rhythms and filmmaking beats that I’d learned in horror, I think they’re just naturally ingrained in me.

So, for instance, I liked creating moments of silence that were suddenly punctuated by action. And I think I must be subconsciously looking for that vocal reaction that you get from a horror film. It’s almost like I was putting those horror beats into a sci-fi context: Build, build, catharsis. Build, build, catharsis. So maybe that’s in there, just ingrained.

[Skip the next few paragraphs if you don’t want to be spoiled for an early scene in Upgrade, as well as the general direction of the film.]

TechCrunch: That’s certainly true to my experience. For a lot of it I was incredibly tense, and the moment when his head gets cut open, I just screamed.

Wannell: [laughs] In the operation?

TechCrunch: No, in the first kill.

Wannell: Ah, yes, the Pez dispenser!

TechCrunch: God, yeah. That was very upsetting.

Wannell: If you look at that scene and you analyze the structure, there is kind of a horror-esque metronome to it, where it’s quiet, it’s tense, and then there’s an explosion of something.

And in watching it, it’s been interesting to see that that scene gets a vocal reaction. It’s not the same reaction that a horror movie gets, that sort of scream in the audience, but it’s almost like an adrenaline rush, and when he gets up off the floor, I see people clapping along. I’m like, “Oh cool, this is a spectator sport, they’re getting into it as participants.”

TechCrunch: When I read the description of the film — obviously, the marketing is emphasizing this dystopian, almost horrific element, but you still think, “Oh, he’s basically going to become this superhero, and there’s maybe going to be this dark side to it, but it’s still going to be this ultimately triumphant story.” Whereas throughout the whole film, there’s this darker undertone that feels very different.

Wannell: I feel like the superhero version of this movie where somebody is given something — a power or a computer chip, whatever it is — that’s been done, especially in this age we live in, it’s been done a lot. So I found what was more interesting was to do the Taxi Driver version of this, to do the version where you realize the bad guy is in your body and the fight is not between you and external forces. It’s actually two entities fighting over the same physical body. That was interesting to me.

[End spoilers]

TechCrunch: One of the things you also mentioned in the press materials was this idea of having the freedom of an independent film but also having the scope of a larger science fiction film. I don’t know what the budget was, but I assume it wasn’t Avengers-scale.

Wannell: [laughs] Very low.

TechCrunch: What was the overall approach you took to saying, “Well, we don’t have all that money but we’re still going to try to build a world that has scope”?

Wannell: It’s just been a real goal and a dream of mine to do that. To make a movie that enjoyed the worldbuilding of sci-fi but took advantage of the creative freedom of an independent. The problem is that one is supposed to cancel the other out. You’re supposed to need studio money if you’re going to go off and make the future-set action movie. So I really was trying to have my cake and eat it, but I was obsessed with doing it.

As a model, I used ‘80s sci-fi films that I grew up with. I used the original Terminator as a great example, because if you really study that movie scene-by-scene, the science fiction and the tech is doled out very judiciously and sparingly. It’s kind of this lean-and-mean, slash-and-stalk movie that is dressed in this sci-fi skin. And I loved that.

I feel like, if they can achieve that sort of sleight of hand in the ’80s, then we could do it now. Especially with the new advantage that they didn’t even have back then of CG. We could use CG to augment some of the scenes. We couldn’t go bananas with it, but we could utilize it at certain moments. And I guess I’m too close to the movie, I’ve spent too long with it to know if we really succeeded, but I’m hoping that audiences feel like they’re watching a bigger movie, you know? That they’re part of a bigger world.

TechCrunch: Right, and there’s a couple of things in the beginning that feel very big —

Wannell: Like, here’s the world!

TechCrunch: Which, if I go back clinically and watched it, I would see that those are doled out very strategically. But it does the job. And it also is an interesting constraint because it means that in a lot of the other scenes, you have one or two science fictional elements, but you’re using primarily a real world location or set, rather than a created world.

Wannell: Absolutely, and that was something that was a very conscious decision. Not just budgetary, but a creative decision for me was: Let’s set this movie in the very near future. Let’s build a world that the audience can see themselves in.

Also, the world doesn’t change completely overnight, it happens incrementally. In 30 years time, you’ll still have buildings from the 1800s in New York City. They’re not going to knock them down and build a glass tower. So what you’re going to end up in 30, 40 years is a landscape in Manhattan that is the future sort of jammed on top of the past and it’ll be this hybrid.

And people will still be driving older cars! That’s another thing that you see in a lot of future movies, all of a sudden everyone on the road is driving the future car. And I’m like, well no, there will still be people 20 years from now driving around in early ’90s Hondas, crappy cars, you know? That scaling of the world was important, but a bonus prize was that it helped us budgetarily.

TechCrunch: You mentioned that this is something that you started writing six years ago. In that time, the technology has evolved, but also the ways in which we talk or think about disability, and the ways we talk about being quadriplegic or paraplegic has changed. To what extent was that part of your research, things like talking to disability activists?

Wannell: I didn’t talk so much to activists. When I was writing the film, I wanted the idea that a chip could cure paralysis, I wanted that to be a tangible thing and I talked to a surgeon and he said, “Look, what you’re talking about is hypothetical, but in theory, it could be done. That gap between our brain and our nerve endings could be bridged by a computer.” And that was great to walk away with, the knowledge that the tech was credible.

Certainly when we were preparing to shoot the film, we took the quadriplegic side of it very seriously. Logan [Marshall-Green], who plays Gray, he worked with a guy who was a quadriplegic who was nice enough to spend a lot of time with Logan, share his life with him, talk to Logan, let Logan see what his daily rituals were like, let him actually use a chair.

And Logan had a lot of integrity about that. He felt he owed this gentleman that he had worked with the responsibility of portraying that realistically, and he was really watching it, the way he held his hands. It’s not a long moment in the film that he spends as a quadriplegic, but it was important for us for that moment to have as much integrity as anything else in the film. Especially with something that in real life, people are experiencing. You don’t want to push back at them some wonky cinematic version of the real thing.

TechCrunch: Part of what I’m getting at is, is there’s this opening image that you mentioned of him rising out of the chair. It’s this incredibly moving scene for him because you’ve been through all of these terrible things with him. But at the same time, you can imagine somebody who is quadriplegic watching the film and you don’t necessarily want them to look at themselves and think —

Wannell: Them thinking, “Oh, you’re presenting this as triumphant, as if that’s much better.” Yeah, that’s interesting, that is part-and-parcel of putting films out into the world, isn’t it? The world reflects back at you and I think you just have to take those slings and arrows. Nothing was done with any malice.

And I don’t think we were trying to present the idea that quadriplegia is this hellish situation that only being able-bodied can cure. What I think we were doing is speaking to the story of a guy who hates technology becomes technology. The way that we were enabled to do that in the story was through his condition, his quadriplegia. So it’s the result of an accident, he’s given this chip, and now he’s completely reliant on it, you know? It’s totally a story point for us.

TechCrunch: And again, without getting into too many spoilers, you said that this is the Taxi Driver version of the story. How much of that was trying to express your own concerns about people becoming more automated?

Wannell: I think a lot of it. First and foremost, I’m trying to tell this genre story, I’m trying to build a unique movie. And then the themes and the questions of the film sit underneath it.

But I have a foot in both camps with technology. Especially in researching the script and reading books by Ray Kurzweil and authors that talk about the Singularity and the point at which humans and tech will merge. Because I didn’t want to make a robot film. A robot film has been done before and I wasn’t really interested in that. I was interested in human beings putting tech into their bodies voluntarily. That was something I felt I hadn’t seen a lot of.

Through my research and reading these books, I saw both sides. I saw the wonderful side of our reliance on tech in regards to medicine. If we can install something in our bloodstream or our bodies that cures cancer, that’s obviously going to be an amazing, wonderful thing. But there’s the other foot in the other camp, which is our overreliance on automation. I’m wondering if our cars do the driving for us and our kitchens do the cooking, are we actually designing ourselves into irrelevance? That’s an interesting road to look down. It seems to me the human instinct is to always make things easier. We’re always leaping towards convenience: “Oh, wouldn’t it be better if a machine could do that?”

I’m wondering where that road ends. The movie was definitely a reflection of that, too.

TechCrunch: The last thing I’m going to ask, which I think I’m sort of required to ask, is to what extent is this meant to be a completely standalone experience? Have you thought about a potential sequel?

Wannell: I haven’t. The thought enters my mind and I push it away. Because this is an independent film, and it’s really hard in today’s media landscape to get people to pay attention to things. We’re releasing the movie in summer, surrounded by giant movies. I can’t imagine what the marketing budget for the new Han Solo movie is. To compete against that is almost foolhardy, so I feel like planning a sequel is an assumption of success that I’m not ready for.

Sitting there being vexed about where to go with a sequel would be a great problem to have.

TechCrunch: Well, it certainly doesn’t feel like a movie that was written with a sequel in mind.

Wannell: No, it definitely wasn’t. I remember when James Wan and I did the first Saw movie, a lot of people would say to us, “Well, you left the door open for a sequel.” And we would say, “No, we literally closed the door!” We thought it was a nice ending. Little did we know that the producers had other ideas once the film was a hit.

To us, the ending to that movie, in our opinion, was the very definition of a cut to black, no more story. But then we got a lesson in commerce.

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