American Captive

20

 At my Rockaway apartment, I spend time slumped on a chair, in catatonic shock. 
 I can’t respond to anything. 
 It feels like I’m in a coma, but still awake. 
 It feels like I’m dreaming with eyes wide open. 
 I’m can’t move at all. My neck is rigid, stiff. But I sense my head is going from place to place, traveling without moving. Around the world without leaving.
 From scene to scene. 
 First, a mental hospital and a padded room. Where I’m assessed by a panel of doctors who judge me mentally fit to stand trial for arson. 
 Then I shuffle in my mind to a court scene with red and gold volumes of law books on shelves behind a judge. I can smell the mint in my lawyers mouth as he whispers a plea deal into my ear. Here my attorney argues that a foreign substance started the condo blaze. The fire’s point of origin was caused by an unknown alien chemical that continues to baffle investigators. So the case never goes to trial. I’m released. An innocent young man. 
 In my catatonic dream, which seems to be so vivid and true, I’m then abducted outside the courthouse by aliens, body-snatched, taken aboard a spaceship. One of those aliens is Carl Busby who unzips from his body to reveal his jelly-like insides. I always counted him as odd, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Jordan Shamshack is flying with us, too. She is still very human in her beauty. She’s to be my space queen. But I’m told, as we ascend, as we leave the atmosphere of Earth, that her first order of business on a new planet will be to eat me alive. I already see the gleam of hunger in her eyes. So before we reach escape velocity, about to hit our exit speed, I get desperate to go home. As Jordan gives her final backward glance at the land and sea below, I sneak away to a launch pod. It ejects me from the spaceship. This month long dream ends with me parachuting back down to Earth.   
 Back in my apartment, my mother places the phone next to my ear, while she spoons some clam chowder into my mouth. 
 On the phone line, I hear the gruff voice of Frank Benzino saying, “After you’ve had enough time off work, after you get some rest, we at Calgon Tech would love to have you back.”
 His English accent is missing. He sounds more Australian. 
 This phone call snaps me out of my frozen catatonic state. 
 I rush for the security guard uniform that hangs neatly pressed in my closet. 
 I button the shirt, strap the belt, pin the badge, lace the boots.
  My speeding to work is done in anticipation over whether I will see the condos burned to the ground, nothing but ash. As I exit the highway, however, I look upon the same condos still standing, like I never witnessed the spaceship fireballs that destroyed them. 
 The only difference now is the sign at the front entrance. Where it used to say, The Clear Lake Condo Estate, it now says, Calgon Tech: The Virtuplex.
 I’m alone in the trailer for hours without knowing what did or did not happen here. It was a dangerous memory that would not fade from my experience. And yet, I have to move on. I must move on. Something fantastic did happen here. But the aftermath of that fantasy didn’t hold up. Nobody wants to hear about something that was just a dream. We all dream. Get over it.
 How long was I gone? Was I gaslighted? Have I been discredited? I don’t know. I now wade in confusion. 
 I’ve been wondering if anyone actually looks at my security sheets. On  slow nights I’ve been toying the idea of using my clipboard as a journal instead. Just to see if anyone notices. 
 Finally, yes, I jot it down with a pen. This is what I write:

LOG 1: Feeling Lost

 “I’ve worked a total of one year without a break from the Clear Lake Condos.
 Monday is missing. 
 Monday is more than missing, it was never there.
 The clock speeds ahead. 
 Tuesday comes and goes. 
 My mind gets warped by time. 
 Wednesday has all the feeling of a Friday. 
 A minute becomes more like a month. 
 Thursday is a blur. 
 Two weeks turn almost eternal. 
 Tuesday comes again. 
 My mind is dizzy and swimming. 
 There is snow in the summer season. 
 Seconds seem to slip by. 
 On yet another Tuesday.”

I note the clock time as whenever. Then I sign off on it, to make it official.

LOG 2: Feeling Mute

 Again I use my security sheets as a journal, since nobody raised alarm about my last entry, yesterday. 

 “Outside this trailer is all dark. Surrounding the trailer is a deep, deep silence. I let my mind do some thinking, but I only hear faint wind chimes that suddenly stop. The silence is all around me. The lake is still. Time passes by in slow increments. Time stretches out, expands, goes further. Time goes beyond time. The end has no end.
 The forest behind me is a fortress of quiet wood. Thinking ahead, I try to picture my life ten years from now, in anticipation. I can’t. My past is gone, since my memory has been set adrift. Or maybe I’m just absent. 
 From a factory mill, a smokestack in the distance emits smoke without a noise. 
 The silence is heavy and the darkness almost has a dense weight to it. I wonder how long I can withstand this way too quiet place.
 Right now, it feels like time has stopped, like a digital camera is constantly capturing the same moment.
 My eyes are starting to see things in frames. 
 Since nothing has changed in hours, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.
 Working this job for one year straight, without a single night off duty, the nights hardly mean anything to me, because I’m sleeping and eating and returning to work.
 The drudgery of the routine is embedded in my brain. The routine is a danger to my psyche.”

 I just realize that I’ve been scribbling with such a fast scrawl, my words aren’t legible. My words start on my clipboard but cross over to the blueprint drawings that span the workstation desk. So I end my journal entry there, with a little stick man figure of me on the blueprints.

LOG 3: Feeling Numb

 Using the security sheets on my clipboard for another journal entry, I write:

 “Tonight, I try to fight off the loneliness. I try to fend off that lonesome feeling. This type of effort depletes my will power. I yearn for conversation, any conversation at all. I try to remember the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. I know there must be a difference.
 I think of myself as trapped. I can place the dimension of a prison cell, mentally, from the lake to the highway to the condos high on the hill. 
 Waiting is the worst part.
 Every moment is counted for.
 Once again, the night is silent.
 The trees, they don’t move. The lake, it doesn’t move. The heavy duty machines, still. 
 As long as I keep still, all segments of time can be lumped together as one marathon night in history.
 If I look at myself the right way, I can see the invisible chains, the shackles on my body. With the right pair of eyes I can see the invisible bars that surround the Clear Lake construction site.
 This is catatonic despair. 
 And it feels so frozen because there is no real tool to chisel the ice off my skeleton.
 I feel like a nobody from nowhere with nothing to do. 
 Working here makes me empty out, lose feeling, become numb. The numbness is the result of being here too long, working a solo routine, night after night, drug after smokable drug. 
 In the zombie zone, I care for nothing right now. 
 An hour ago, in my truck, I turned on the interior light to look at myself in the visor mirror. I had no expression on my face, just a blank sagging effect, no visible emotion. 
 My hand lifted up from my lap to my throat, checking for a pulse. I had trouble to locate a throbbing neck vein, which caused me to think I’m dead. Then, opening the dashboard compartment, I found a safety pin to prick my finger with. I stuck myself hard, but no blood came to the surface. That worried me, so I stuck myself again, harder. Blood trickled out.
 The blood was blue.”

 I end the journal entry there because my tear ducts start to sting from dryness.

LOG 4: Feeling Dead

 Looking at my security clipboard, the fresh white sheet, those empty lines, I struggle for words. I eventually manage to write my final entry: 

 “I sit here in the center of this silence, and the silence has a white-knuckle stranglehold over this entire neighborhood. 
 Even when astronauts come back to Earth after a long space trip, they need therapy to walk among the human race. This job is like that. I am out there.
 Now is the best time for me to confront the serial killer who squats in the condos, Gary Lee Vickers.”

21

 Gary Lee Vickers has run out of space to hide. All the condos have been sold. Every condo has been moved into, except for one last unit. 
 Unit 96.
 If he’s still here, and I suspect he is, I know where to find him.
 I slot the key into Unit 96 very slowly.
 I don’t close the door behind me, leave it wide open, in case Vickers has a weapon. 
 I make my way around the completed condo, through furniture-empty rooms. 
 In the upstairs hallway, I pull the cord that unlatches the attic staircase from the ceiling.
 “Vickers?” I call out. “Gary Lee Vickers?”
 No answer from the dark attic.
 “I’m the security guard here. I know you sleep here. You know that I know you sleep here. And I never reported you, so you know it’s safe to come out now.”
 “Mike Miller,” I hear Vickers say from that darkness. “The guard for the evening.”
 I hear him laugh a little.
 I’m startled that he has my name, so I fight my better instinct to retreat fast.   
 I’m not sure I want to actually meet him or see his disfigured face up close, so I say, “All the condos are sold. You’re gonna need to find a new place to squat. Just a warning.”
 I hear the attic floorboard start to creak. 
 It’s that sound that lets me know that of all the things I’ve been disillusioned about here, the presence of Gary Lee Vickers is real. 
 As he takes backward steps down the attic staircase, I brace myself for his murderous threat.
 We face each other. He’s beyond ugly, botched by cheap surgery.
 He says, “So you never reported me. Why is that?”
 “You were here before me,” I say. “By the time I realized you were here, I had already fallen in love with this place. I could sit on my ass without complaint. You left me undisturbed.”
 “It is time for me to move along,” he says. “You’re right about that. I’m sure I’ll find another construction site to squat in. But finding a guard who doesn’t squeal, I won’t be a fool to expect that much. I was lucky to have you.”
 “You did nothing wrong here, I far as I can see.”
 “No, I didn’t. And that’s the point. Well, maybe a few bad things. I made a copy of your keys to get into some condos, to take showers and, you know, raid refrigerators for food.”
 “Nobody ever said anything to me about stolen food.”
 “Only took enough to survive.”
 “Wait, made copies of my keys, how?”
 “You were blackout drunk a few times. I snatched it off your hip. But I returned them before you got back to your senses.”
 “Anything else I should know of? Anything else bad?”
 “Well. Maybe some other things.”
 “What happened?”
 “Some nights I’d get a little worn down with nothing to do, so I’d peep into condos. I’d watch the people watching news coverage of my prison escape. It’s a strange thing to watch other people watching.”
 Inwardly, I’m remembering how I did the same thing once, watching some of the neighbors watch a talent show on TV. Remembering that sad blue glow on their faces.
 “Hey, buddy,” he jolts me back from the memory. “Who watches the watchman?”
 “You do, apparently.”
 Gary Lee Vickers, with his missing nose and his sagging eye and twisted lips, says to me, “You’re a good guy, Mike Miller. You’re a bit crazy at times, but you always keep some normal logic going in that crazy brain of yours. Hey, thanks for keeping a lookout. Hey, I should get going. Hey, do me a favor. One day they’ll catch me, send me back to death row. I thought for some time I might shoot it out with the cops if it ever came to that. But being here for a while, in a nice neighborhood, not killing anyone, I’ve kinda lost a little of my grisly aggression. When they catch me, do me a favor. Tell people I’m not as bad as they think, huh? Might spare me the electric chair.”
 I have no other option but to agree. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to hype the other side of his harmless ying-yang personality. 
 In truth, right now, I have other concerns, more stress. Since the construction is done, where will I work next? 
 Gary Lee Vickers gathers his pillow from the attic, along with a pair of oversized sneakers. I wait for him while he laces them up. 
 Then he says, “Climbed up a deck here one time, looked into a bedroom window, looked in on a man with some kind of helmet strapped across his face, like a helmet for the future. Whatchu call it, virtual? So I got jealous. It’s the kinda thing I’ll miss out on when I go back to prison. So I snuck in, undid his shoelaces, stole the sneakers right off his feet.”   
 I have to ask, “He never felt you pull them off?”
 “Oh, man. He was lost in some kind of la-la land. Never felt but a tickle. You see, it’s just that type of fun experience I won’t get in lock-up. Magical worlds. Hey, man, it’s been fun, but I can tell by the look in your eyes you’re disgusted with my hacked up face, so I’ll save you any more sight of it. Hey, you know what I’m gonna miss the most here, besides those hotdogs from the food cart?”
 “What?”
 “That porcelain elephant collection in one of them condos. Such a sweet collection. Made my ass feel right at home.”
 I drift off for a moment. I recall how those white elephants rained down from the sky, how they shattered on the highway the day this whole neighborhood exploded.  
 When I come back from that vision in mind, Gary Lee Vickers is gone. 
 I suppose it’s good he had to sneak away so quickly.
 And I figure it best we go different ways. His guilt-by-association was beginning to creep up on me.
 Although, I must say, there is a part of our conversation that almost gets lost, that remains unspoken. 
 I go outside, down by the lake to retrieve that lost conversation. It is something that went unspoken between us. It is something I registered only in my subconscious, as a dark vibe. His dark vibe. That strange missing part of our conversation, I find it at the lapping edge of lake water. 
 What Gary Lee Vickers, mass murderer, had only suggested, was this:
 “All these nice people here, there isn’t one of them I couldn’t kill with a flick of my wrist. The toughest one here, I wasn’t but fifteen moves to his mind. And when I got there, I’d give him fifteen blows to the back of his skull with an ice pick. But I didn’t. And that’s the point. So remember this, it’s always better on the outside.”     
 The words of this non-verbal part of our conversation carry over the lake like a thin vapor. 
 I keep staring out from this dark waterfront, into that mist. 
 I feel chills on my flesh, rippling cold. 
 Not much longer after, I see a shadowy object approaching in the distance. It skims over the lake surface. I rub the dark night out of my eyes.
 It’s a man. In a canoe. 
 He paddles slowly. The canoe glides toward me.
 The canoe scuffs the sand of the shoreline. 
 I recognize the man but not his name. I can’t believe I remember him. He’s the mailman who got fired from his job a year ago because the internet stole it from him. If I remember right, he had a noose that I can still picture as knotted. I’m sure that day he meant to kill himself by hanging from it. 
 He reminds me again, his name is Gerald Jerome. 
 He tells me he did plan to commit suicide that day, but while he dangled from a tree branch, about to die, a group of half-naked people ran through the forest to lift him up, re-deliver oxygen to his brain. He says now he camps in the woods with those same half-naked people. A commune, he calls it. But he hints there is more to this group, a purpose they all live for, possibly bent on some anti-tech mindset. He invites me to join their environment friendly movement. To come . . .  live with them.
 Neo-luddite.   
 Eco-terrorism.
 S.A.N.E
 Stand Against Networked Environments 
 Gerald Jerome tells me I’ll have to quit drugs, since our motivation will be to stay grounded in reality, to be true to ourselves. He asks me to accept that personal challenge. To stop all my escapism.
 I ask this jobless guy for a few minutes to decide. I walk back up the paved incline to the condo unit where I last saw Vickers. The last empty unsold condo. This is a place I never wanted to leave. Now, this is a place I will return to only in my mind, as a memory.
 I tell the lights by voice command to switch on. I imagine there’s a table in the kitchen. I imagine it with such force of thought until it lay ready with dinner plates. 
 There I sit. Waiting for my guests.
 Their delay, I attribute to a 3D printer getting jammed up with carbon nanotubes. Their lateness, I blame on the toughest material known to exist in nature. Worse than that old excuse, stuck in traffic, this type of elevator-to-space material causes my guests to miss dinner at six.
 The automatic oven has been cooking the spiced-up lamb for three hours already. I can smell it, almost taste it.   
 My dinner guests, the six of them, are supposed to be as follows: a friend, a lover, a former-lover, a business partner, a family member, and a charity accepting stranger. But none of them show. The invitations must’ve got lost in the mail. So the dinner party never starts. 
 Instead, the automatic oven starts to smoke. The lamb starts to burn. Then, I think, it starts to rain inside the condo. But really it’s just the sprinkler system.
 The sprinkler system, I now realize, is just some tears I’d have one day when I fully miss this place. No more face-to-face with the Clear Lake Condo Estate.
 I find myself running out, away from that condo, leaving the lights behind me on. A war begins. A third world war, everyone in the digital trenches. 
 When an American soldier finds a prisoner of war, he’ll test that POW with American movie trivia, just to see if he’s really American, not a terrorist. He’ll say, “Who was at the dinner party in that movie, Six at Six? And with a smile of gratitude at being rescued, the POW will say, “It’s a trick question. Nobody. Just the host. Divide and conquer. Leaving just one. Lights on, but nobody home. A split between the real world and the virtual. Such a legendary divorce. Cult-classic. So good to see you, bro, you don’t even know.”
 The burnt lamb back there gives me an idea. I’m done eating meat, now a fruit and vegetable man. But it also gives me another idea. Burn things. Using toilet paper from the portable toilet, I create something of a short wick, to be stuffed into the gas tank of my monster truck. Then I light the thing, that atmosphere killing gas hog.    
 Before anything explodes, I meet the shadow of a figure, Gerald Jerome, down by the lake, under the moon. I bring my decision. 
 I catch myself watching myself, detached from the action, as I step inside the canoe. 
 It’s always better on the outside.
 As Gerald Jerome pushes off the land with his paddle, we sail across, a boat through the digital mist. Tiny squares of floating gray, shifting layers of lighter and darker squares of gray.
 I can feel myself breath the misty air in, gaining a second life wind.  
 These are my episodes. Episodes in digital conquest.  
 These are my dispatches, sent from the cold front.

Ok. I really liked parts where the security guard loneliness cones out. The serial killer went too fast, and I would have liked to know him better.
I was security myself and have anecdotal empathica, bored and alone, no backup, armed, and reading Celine. I guess Celine is very much a reminiscence of Your style, it does really capture the pathos within. One real interesting facet is with him, is the absurd and brazen attempt to write , ‘America’ without being never there.

But just like how Kerouac envisions America, as a place that isn’t there, a Saturday night where everyone cruises to, but never get there, it is true to form.

I think his Long Day’s Journey Into the Night was remarkable, and kept me from the bug house during those long lonely nights.

Later I was totally disillusioned by learning of his rabid anti semitism, which even the Germans found irritable and way over hyperbolic.

Firstly, thank you for giving my story a shot. You’ve been a thorough reader, which makes you a companion, since this story is semi-autobiographical. In a way you’ve got to know a person intimately, in a way people in my real life only graze the surface. You’ve also allowed me to move on from this story since it was my first attempt at a short novel. I’ve had a hard time letting it go, and I could probably tweak it and write different endings to it for the rest of my life.

Above everything, this story was my attempt to show what it will be like when people start to go to work in the virtual world and life becomes similar to a video game. I’m not sure I captured that. After all, I started writing it 20 years ago, BEFORE the first Iphone came out. It was hard to portray virtual reality two decades before it actually hit the marketplace.

This story is different for many people. I’ve had one reader say this was the funniest book they’ve read, probably because they know me. For them, I don’t think the fantastic scenes held much that was believable. Maybe you got a laugh, but then again, maybe you saw it as a serious work.

I’m really happy that you could identify and even enjoy the passages of loneliness. I was wary that might bore most readers, but it sounds like you recognized something in them because of you security work. Understanding the loneliness was crucial to understanding the atmosphere, which you did.

It’s funny that you mentioned Kerouac. It was his few paragraphs in On The Road about a security guard, and the park ranger in Dharma Bums that let me know that I could share my version of the Night Watchman.

Celine however, I’m unfamiliar with. A Journey to the End of Night is a fine title and would have summarized my story completely. Thanks for recommending that author. I am sure to check him out!

I agree that I treated the serial killer perhaps too fast. The serial killer represented a conventional plot and kept things moving, but I still had the video game life in mind. In my view, playing video games is super fun, but when you shut the system down, there is something empty, something that lacks achievement. It doesn’t matter how many points I rack up, how many levels I complete, what dragons I slayed, there was the big fat nothing waiting for me at the end. The pathos you mentioned is that cold feeling. Of doing much that amounts to little. Of interacting but never fully participating. So the serial killer subject has the reader wanting more, which sometimes stays out of reach.

Lastly, I can tell that style is important you. Whatever the story has or doesn’t have, I hope you at least got a good ride on the language. Thanks for your honest and clear assessment.

My goal is to create stories that readers like to go back to, maybe find more. 2x for you!!!

See ya, brave poet.

Secret underground bump

C’mon everyone make me happy and read my tale. April 1st will be a great day for craft members.

And it never really comes to light. Despair of it overcomes any doubt: and for me it is consistent with a yoga .
The power of the kundalini is profound, and it fires the many shades of grey that it connects. It overcomes 'Its self toward a fearless - potential all inclusive possibility of being it’self, in the constantly reoccurring higher order.

All inconsistent modalities either fall by the wayside, but again re integrated through feedback of the invisible eye.

The bump here is the huddling through the anachronism of desire to define Samadhi, as a possession. It huddling through of this stage is inherent in total surrender.

Your tale, is the tale of many, who can not realize its potential, as the dog’s motive , waging the war of tales.

The existence of abstract relations within appears almost fool proof’d, the illusion works best whom it seems to benefit.

It is the final leap of the evolutionary form into the hungry ghost of desire.

Once this point is instilled, ALL golden edicts erase any pre functional selves

“This subversive text was inspired by the UnaBomber’s manifesto, but more importantly, by Time Wars by Jeremy Rifkin, the most interesting book I have ever read and for some very strange reason out of print.”

“The kind of thing a prisoner would read with all that jail time.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sqq9SHrfvQ[/youtube]

…

I’m calling the agenda police on you

They would for close themselves into untimely dearth, were they even respond.

They would blind themselves with fear when media would look at them, they could not imprison that, …

youtu.be/I6Veqg8ZcqI

Berkely babe!

I’m captivated don’t let me hang.

You make sense some times.

Time, Time for some action!

youtu.be/fkxPGdZIY-c

Top of the charts.

I’m pretty big on the underground.

Got the metaphor previously, literally, bump…

Meno is a vampire.