Asphasia Reinholt: A Blissful ignorance
You can’t let it go forever.
Like it or not, you keep some things with you over the years. Wonder if things could have turned out differently, if through some stroke of luck you could have pulled the lever in time, accepted the offer for the role of Directorial Assistant in Sucret, or accessed the elevator before she pressed the button.
Sitting outside bundled up in the middle of January, letting your mind freeze over, is one of the simpler decisions we make. Pond is frozen, frozen like time when you capture it and store it. Beautiful. Writing this, will type it out later.
I realize now that I am heir to a legacy and cannot allow this opportunity to pass by unchecked. My life is particularly unmemorable- I mean a blur, a rapid-fire procession of events that seem to me like only a second. Is that how everyone sees things?
Know only that some things can’t be buried, and this is one.
Jameson: Initial Offering
I keep having these weird auditory hallucinations.
Like, I’ll be at my desk, and the door is closed, window is shut behind me, so there’s really no noise. Complete silence, stillness, all I feel is the sun on my back and my hand getting tired from filling out charts. And then, whoosh, there it is.
Usually it’s a female voice, sounds 2-30, sometimes it’s a man. She says something very softly. They sound like words I should know but don’t, an obscure dialect or a slightly different language, I strain to figure it out but she leave for the next half hour or so. There is some kind of viscera in her tone. A warning, perhaps?
I don’t know what the warning could be for. I saw my therapist and he prescribed me with some kind of antipsychotic but the voices continue. Don’t think I’m going crazy, in the movies the voices always tell you to do things so that you can understand them and carry out their orders, but I don’t understand these at all. They show up without reason out of the void, say something to me, and then they’re gone. Sometimes I think I catch one of them out of the corner of my eye, late at night. But there’s nobody there. Just the rotating ceiling fan above me and the window which looks out over the garden.
They’ll keep contacting me for as long as I let them in. I need to humor them and pacify them. Pay them no mind, like a fly or an itch you can’t reach. Move on with my day.
Honestly, I have better things to do.
Ward: Loose Ends
Do you ever feel like the world is- wrong?
You wake up and go over to the coffee machine and turn it on, and something about the way it looks- its design, maybe, is unsettling. How its lid tapers off, the arrangement of the buttons, the sound it makes when your cup is ready. You’ve had it for years, it’s yours and you’ve used it a hundred times, but all of a sudden it’s completely alien to you.
This has been happening to me. I’ll be driving to work, minding my own business, and that thought will creep its way in. This is not the way things are meant to be, it says. And sometimes- just out of the corner of my eye- I see things differently. Things from- well, somewhere else.
Where that place is, I couldn’t tell you. But they’re very different.
Asphasia: Time’s A Bitch
Visited the premises earlier today. The entire place has been disassembled, it’s no longer recognizable as a building. If it’s how he described it, it must have been massive. Now there’s only a pit and some construction equipment, rusting in the sunlight and the storms of the equinox. It’s poetic, isn’t it?
They must still be operating somewhere, of course. No organization of their size ever truly ends. They’ll persist in splinter groups and fragments, hushed tones and back-alley deals. But for now, all that remains is this site. It feels haunted, there’s a definitive presence here in the locust-coated crabgrass and lone cottonwoods. Occasionally, I can make out its distant whisper, miles off, like a gathering thunderstorm.
It’s not a person as much as it is the spirit of progression- cause and effect, one domino knocking the rest down. The irretrievable knowledge stored here- all swept away like leaves in the wind. That’s what the whisper is. Information.
Who needs it? I should stop.
Jameson: Tired
Still hearing the voices. Sound like my father. I never met him, of course, but I know that’s how he would have sounded. Something genetic, inherited schizophrenia. I’ve tried finding out about it with my Connectron, but like everything else around here it doesn’t seem to hold any of the answers. At least I got my stimulus check from President Gore today. That’s something to be thankful for amid this sea of headache and misery.
Yes, definitely genetic. It must be. There’s really no other explanation, Asphasia said she found something of his- something which would damage his legacy if anyone saw it. I trust her. I know dad was an eccentric, but he certainly wasn’t crazy. He knew something. If I could just give in, I could find the answers.
I don’t want to give in, though, something in me resists. A conscience, perhaps, or self preservation. It’s like standing on top of a cliff and wanting to dive over it. You see the rocks below and you know you’ll die but the air seems so tempting. That’s what it’s like when I start feeling myself slipping away, into somewhere-
I should probably call Ward. We need to remain close, all three of us, because something is coming, a storm is gathering, and when it lets loose, I don’t think it’ll hold back.
Filthy Treatise 