The Born Again

It can be expected that it surprised everyone when the dead came back to life. No one prognosticated who, or what, or when, it just happened. There was no Sylvia Browne or obscure Nostradamus book that foretold it. Every so often, they just popped out of their graves the way grubs do becoming Japanese Beetles to munch on people's rosebushes. It took a considerable amount of doing considering they were once dead. But whoever and whatever was affected by this strange occurrence that would become known as the Lazarus Phenomenon, just came to life and started to dig their way out instinctively like baby sea turtles who then scamper for the ocean, their lives in constant peril.  

Of the people who've emerged thus far, of note, there is Ernest Hemingway, Buddy Holly, Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, and Al Lewis, the guy who played Grandpa Munster. There were others someone else might find more interesting. But those were the most interesting to me. Of course there are some people who are not famous at all, and there were heartwarming stories on newsfeeds frequently of so-and-so coming back. Someone's dearly departed grandpa or grandma, or a kid who died of an incurable disease, which were the best of stories. 

They sometimes picked up right where they left off. They sometimes settled old scores. But the strangest thing about all this was the reverse decomposition process. A body that was once graduated rigor mortis and rotted to the bone suddenly regenerated itself. Rapidly they were as they were before they died, aging backwards for several days until they looked like their old selves. Then they stopped aging, at their "Zenith Point," or "ZP," as scientists coined it. It was the time when they were perfect. For instance, Audrey Hepburn aged back to the time she played Holly Golightly in "Breakfast and Tiffany's," 1961, and there she stopped. Babe Ruth aged back to his most successful baseball season of 1923. They weren't zombies or any more lethal and carnivorous than they were when they were alive. Nor were they listless drooling nincompoops. They were just as erudite and savvy as they had been alive and no different in any way. Some might say they were even more intelligent, having now an appreciation for death. 

Some blamed witchery. Some rogue witch was casting a spell on some distant mountain. Others blamed God and claimed it was His idea of a joke, which made me wonder if God had a sense of humor. I was never taught that in Bible school, but then I couldn't remember anything I was taught other than Jonah was swallowed by a whale and Jesus was born in a manger and some years later, nailed to a cross. Some claimed there was a scientific explanation, but they struggled to make it. 

I had no opinion on the origins of the Lazarus Phenomenon. All I knew was that I had nothing to do with it. I am no conjurer. No extraordinary person, to say the least, though I do bear a striking resemblance to the actor Peter Lorre who played in "Casablanca," "The Maltese Falcon" and "Crime and Punishment" to name a few. I'm just a lonely self-proclaimed writer in an anonymous smalltown who works the bulk of his day in a law office doing menial things and spends his free time farting around like everyone else. Drinking, playing meaningless games, reading, watching meaningless TV. Having meaningless sex when it is afforded, jerking off when it is not. Getting sick, getting healthy. Splurging and eating occasionally at The Olive Garden when I have a coupon, usually alone, feeding off the fake smiles of a pretty server. Hoping for a chance encounter that doesn't ever come to fruition with someone who has never been born and someone who probably wouldn't find me attractive even if she had been. Celebrating holidays for tradition's sake with my family who all have significant others while I sit there by myself smiling and chatting with family members who are doing much better than me, as things go. Paying taxes, which always cruelly reminds me that I am "single." Sleeping alone in a king-size bed. Situating myself in the middle so it doesn't feel as distant to either side, or as absent. Someone said I should get a dog. But that would be giving up. A dog is fine, minus the fleas, but it is a poor substitute for you. You. The vaguest of words for the one I hope somehow reads this.

The writing waits to come out, like those bodies come out of the ground, periodically and unpredictably, when I am not answering the phone or faxing documents or scheduling appointments for other people who make more than I make and who know more than I know. But it waits only so long and then it dissipates like Bengal fire and all I can do then is smell it. Sometimes I shove it all aside and I write fast and random stories - usually strange love stories that make me feel alive. That make me feel like you are alive. That you are here, interested in what I think, or say, or write. And for a little while, I fool myself until the story ends because inevitably all stories end. I'm not aware of one that doesn't. It is not one long and continuos eternal entity. It is as life is. A series of short stories or plays bound by one central theme. The writer. You. Or me. The ubiquitous perceptions of the author put into written words. And these are mine, and as uneventful or tawdry as they might be to some, depending upon my mood, they are as unique to me as my fingerprints. My words are my DNA. 

I sometimes think of the extraordinary things I could write if I had the time to dedicate to it. If not for my preoccupation with eating and paying my mortgage and drinking beer periodically at a local bar where I socialize just enough so that I do not disappear into the cushions of my couch with my change as I watch baseball or read novels of dead but fat more interesting people than the living. Church would suffice in that manner, but bars have better hours and Sunday mornings are conducive for sleep, and the holy ghosts avoid me like neglectful parents. God doesn't mind, I tell myself. He understands. 

But if not for those things, I could be another Shakespeare. Or an F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another Hemingway, who has always been my favorite writer. I would like to ask him what's it like to be back. The last time he was alive he had a shotgun in his mouth and said, presumably "Goodnight, Kitten" before he pulled the trigger in Ketchum, Idaho. Who was Kitten? The first 6 or 7 years of his life he was raised as a girl by his mom, Grace, who called him "Ernestine." She dressed him in dresses and introduced him as his sister Marcelline's twin. I wanted to ask him if that is what happened. Why he was the way he was and wrote the way he wrote. My mind wonders. Wanders. Paints pictures out of nothing and entire universes exist on the back of my eyelids and within the thin film over my two eyes. Oceans. Worlds. And everything therein passes over my field of vision though it doesn't make a sound. I am the God of my thoughts. 

When the phones in the office stop ringing and the emails stop coming and my duties are, for the moment, satisfied in the usual ebb and flow of its banality, I look out the window onto East Main Street and watch people going this way and that way, either on foot or in car, and I wonder if they have any idea at all of where they are actually going. Where they are truly going. If they are true to their natural compass, or if it is broken. Or if they are somewhat glorified diurnal insects that follow the sun and an intrinsic quest for normalcy conditioned in them by TV commercials for shampoo and hardware stores and the patterns of other people imprinted on them so casually they don't even notice. We are widely and collectively outraged by the same commonly agreed upon injustices and prideful of the same widely agreed upon triumphs of our particular identifiable tribe, sect, or brethren. The outrage or pride intensifies the closer we get to our identifiable self. Our innermost circle. We certainly correct those who step out of line. Those who alter their minds and bodies in a manner we find harmful. Those who live in a manner the mass finds to be malignant to the overall body of the whole. We, in short, are less independent than ever before and like to tell other people what to do as it somehow and in someway always perceivably effects us, even when it doesn't. 

And so in a sort of natural progression of thought, I wonder if they know to whom they are going, for we are all going to or from someone. Our lives are spent doing this. It is defined by most as a spouse or a lover, even when improperly or temporarily so. We are all ants by someone larger's perception and we make about as much sense, scurrying about seemingly to satisfy the intrinsic neccessity to conform, to fit, our most basic needs, and our most meretricious delights. Overindulgence in drugs or sports. In sex or booze. In children or exersize. Or a cocktail of things. Those socially-accepted or outlawed pleasures, carnal or otherwise. Some flirt with death and social ruin whenever life bores us. No one is truly happy without true love.

And I see people walking, many on methamphetamine, or drunk, or schizophrenic homeless wanderers who seem to have multiplied tenfold since I was a kid, raging against the repressive societal machine until soon enough they shall be so great in numbers they will upset the balance and unintentionally overthrow the whole. But occasionally I see a couple, which restores my faith in wholesomeness. Whether they are wholesome or not, the appearance is so. There they are, holding hands, smiling, wind in their hair. Then I wonder if they are in love or if they are temporarily filling that intrinsic role the other desires to be filled. Doing their natural duty. Similar to that which I am doing here in this office as a secretary, or office manager, call it what they will to save my prideful masculinity. Filling a role others have filled before and that others will surely fill after me with no regard of me. My picture will not be hung on the wall when I die or leave. The desk, the chair, the computer all will forget me and will be replaced themselves by different machines. But how exclusive are they, I wonder? How much in love, I should say. This couple who walks that sidewalk around noon each day often. Is it a matter of how much you give someone else and how much you take, or does it depend upon the person? As much as I romanticize and have formerly professed, I don't believe in true love and the fabled "meant to be." Those are just lies people tell themselves to feel special and feeling special is the gravest thinking error of all. No one is special. I believe it is a choice to dedicate yourself to someone, and by what degree. I might love you a little or I might love you a lot. There is a volume button within us all that we can turn up or down. I might be okay if you die and move on soon enough afterwards, or I might grieve the rest of my life and remain alone, loyal to your ghost, preferring your absence to anyone else's presence. That is a love uncommon among us. Loyalty is conditional and followed by an asterisk. Terms and conditions invariably apply. These are the realizations that forever discourage me when meeting someone new.

I might be as loyal to you as I am to this job of which I am gazing languidly out her window through wraith-like sheers which dance with the breaths of an autumn afternoon. I might until someone else offers to pay me more or promises me better benefits. Or until you fire me. Until such time we shall be contracted in mutuality by an agreement of love. A party of the first part and party of the second part sort of thing. But I dread that overused word. "Love." Everyone on Jerry Springer loved their significant other. Once Lizzie Borden loved her parents. O.J. loved his wife. Susan Smith, her kids. Once every wife or husband-killer loved their spouse. Once. Oh, these things that I ponder that ruminate inside me like unwanted tenants that I have no recourse to evict. That burrow in my head and fester fastidious critiques of my life and those of others. These are the things a single man considers as he daubs himself in doubt and pity. As languidly he floats imperiled and alone in a choppy sea of only himself and his thoughts. A man with no obligations. 

Contrariwise, a man with a wife has no time to think upon the complexities of love and the universe. He is trapped where he is and cannot wriggle free the freedoms of thought or expression. He is preoccupied with household obligations and filling the pattern of a studious TV sitcom commercial husband and a noble father worthy a Hallmark card for which he is awarded beer and steak and maybe college football. An obligated man cannot forego sleep to write and abstractly philosophize upon such seemingly meaningless things, which mean the world. Half are things I tell myself so that I will believe. For instance, in the previous paragraph I said that love is somehow a matter of will and choice and the intensity of which it is given is like a volume button. All a matter of a chosen and concerted effort rather than that which it actually is, more of a disease, really. An either auspicious or wretched condition, depending upon the circumstance and the person with which it is shared. It is a favorable disease until it turns out unfavorably, then it is the worst among them. I'd take pancreatic cancer over a broken heart. Spoken from someone who has suffered the latter, and watched someone die of the former. 

No. In truth, I haven't been heartbroken. I only say so to excuse 40 some years of bad luck and piss-poor decision-making, mostly on my own part. It gives us no strength to blame others for the outcome of our life for regardless of where we are at and what happened, we are ultimately responsible. I've been disappointed and upset by a relationship ending, but not brokenhearted by any means, which I imagine to be some insufferable loss worse than the paradoxical condition of watching yourself die. And since losing someone I once professed to love never felt that way, I can reasonably deduce that I was in fact not in love as I had once thought I was. If it was necessary to compare it to a measure of things, I would say that I've suffered one fourth of a broken heart once or twice, and the other times were mild heartaches, no greater than a spoonful.

This is all because of one thing - I have yet to meet you. Or perhaps we have met, but I have yet to realize that you are you and you have yet to realize that I am me. Maybe across a bar I have seen you. Stared into your eyes once or twice only you or I looked away before it clicked. It feels that I have been chasing you across time and only you know this because you're aware of the game we play. The way squirrels frolic in the fall park grass between oak trees of different lives. Me finding you. You finding me. One life to another. What is our success rate over time? I do not know. Nor do you, maybe. Or maybe you do and have written a dissertation on it. We only know that we are there, when we are there. When we are not, we are somewhere else. And we are eternally lost without each other. So much for my diatribe on the fictitiousness of love. How quickly I now betray all those prudent and rational thoughts on the matter with one single thought of you. How dangerous it is to believe this, for it condemns a man to a life of misery if not to find you. No one else can ever be you. There is no way to settle for such would be a betrayal and there is no love in betrayal. Is there? 

When I stare intensely enough at something and get lost in the deepest of my thoughts, it is all so very evident that you are a certainty. A condition and not a choice. And though I am like an aged child who believes in Santa Claus, despite all evidence to the contrary, I do. I do as I open letters and make copies and pour coffee and look out the window when the phone isn't ringing and I am not answering. I surmise that more people are on meth in this town than are truly in love. Far more! And that love, for most everyone, is a charade. It is an act. It is participating in roles we are supposed to be in and being happy with the person you're with rather than being truly happy with the person you're not. It is settling and being content. Certainly I could have that even though I look like Peter Lorre. There is a mousey but cute girl in the clerk's office who I find attraction to and who I believe finds even greater attraction to me, but who I pass on daily when I talk to her as I do that day's filings. She waits, undoubtedly, for me to ask her to drinks, but I don't and her anticipatory smile fades as I say goodbye and wish her a good weekend. I cannot allow myself to waste a life, or hers when I know I have nothing for her. I'd rather live alone than live with someone else while there is a chance that you may knock upon my door. There is a reason I leave the porch light on. I leave it on for you. There is a reason I look out the window. I look for you. 

The Lazarus Phenomenon is something out of a terrible science-fiction novel. Something I don't understand, but there are plenty of people rationalizing it on social media and TV. Science people. Religious people. Maybe Sigmund Freud will come back and explain it. Or some quantum theorist no one knows who spent most his life in an dusty office somewhere in Prague predicting this very sort of thing. If these variables simoltaneously or consecutively occur, this is what will be. Things no one in the world could have imagined. Cleopatra rowing up the Nile. Napoleon reclaiming France from the effeminate Macron. And Robspierre and The National Razor lopping off heads of the ineffectual. Charles Lindbergh on another transatlantic flight. Ruth hitting another home run re-signed by the Yankees after a scant hundred year hiatus. And there is JFK on all the news channels, live in 2033, walking down Dealey Plaza, looking around for gunmen. Smiling like he is at peace with the world that once blew his head off. 

"Damndest thing," I heard some old man say in the bar. Then a woman walked in and stood behind him and smiled and he nearly had a heart attack when he turned around, and probably would have if she didn't kiss him immediately and blow the air of life into his lungs. It was his wife who died in 1976 in an automobile accident standing there without a scratch on her. And they left and I looked at the pretty bartender who looked at me and all I could say was, "Damndest thing."

And Marcus Aurelius and Franz Ferdinand walked into some New York City bar at that very moment which was live-streamed around the world. It was on the bar TV with a red scrolling letterbox at the bottom of the screen. It was a new game people were playing - identifying all the dead who came back to life. Spotting them at ballgames, at the zoo, parks, various places. Ben Franklin was recently spotted in a Philadelphia library reading. He was wearing a Philadelphia Phillies ballcap. I ordered another beer and watched it unfold, courtesy the convenience of TV, though it was no more real to me than had it been complete fiction because I never believed TV. It was all manipulated pixels behind a glass facade. Images. Like those in dirty magazines when I was a kid. I suppose I didn't have that good of an imagination because looking around everyone was enthralled and Vegas odds were placed on who would be spotted next. Franz Ferdinand and Marcus Aurelius were very difficult finds being that their faces are not familiar ones and because they were dressed casually in clothes from JC Penney. I knew, only because I had the same blue polo shirt that Franz wore. They were good sports and seemingly happy to be alive again, though like many of the others, their new role on this Earth was very unclear and for the moment, undefined.  

But like all things, I suppose, the novelty wore off. So many people came back that a flurry of opinionated articles were written about the worry of overcrowding. The worry of returning to regressive policies of the past. Modern journalists were being replaced by "Born Again" journalists - the term they snidely referred to them as. But the Born Again journalists were much truer to the craft and expressed no bias of opinion in their reporting - a rather novel concept to adhere to standards of basic journalistic integrity, as Walter Cronkite said. And Andrew Jackson announced he would run for president and Kennedy, mulled it over, aligning himself with the Republican Party because of the hilarity of the modern socialist left. He took up with Marilyn Monroe and ran for a senate seat in New York and was, despite everything, a huge favorite to win because the Kennedy name was a brand, all the journalists agreed. But then it was announced that Major League Baseballs' Player's Association denied Born Again players first the right to collective bargain and then the right to play, so the Born Again players started their own league, reminiscent of the Negro Leagues, without ads, without social justice virtue signaling, and with average pay. They packed the stands and got far better ratings than the MLB. And Lucky Luciano took over the New York underworld and then Vegas and the FBI and the modern organized crime bosses were in a tizzy. 

It went on and on. Hollywood went the same way. Golden Age actors and actresses came back and rejuvenated long-lost Tinseltown class and the art of film. Script writers wrote good scripts again and those who thrived on shitty superhero films and rancid rehashed poorly-acted culture dramas were soon out of work. Of course they pissed and they moaned, and hoped it was all just a passing phase, but what could they do? The Academy Awards were won by once dead actors and actresses and directors like Hitchcock and DeMille and so on and so forth. And the jealousy and outrage became so intense that there were violent clashes and threats of civil war, but that was all talk because the Moderners, as they called themselves, in all their social conscience gender fluidness, were undoubtedly no match for the grit and toughness of the Born Again. All this happened live on my TV. 

But of course a potential civil war was not so cut and dry because many of the living sided with the Born Again rather than the Moderners who we loathed. So the distinct lines that one thought would be drawn, weren't in what emerged as the social and civil paradox of our time. And apart from the famous, it was difficult to distinguish between the living and the "dead," as they were now called by the Moderners, though they were in all respects alive just like anyone else. And the living, despite being bombarded by an ad campaign and social pressure from the liberal puppet masters, were quite unwilling to give up their loved ones who, by God, the conservatives claimed, had returned to them. All this I watched on various TVs, feeling more and more manipulated as time went on. Feeling as though this was all some fantastical exploitation of my senses in order to get me to watch their damn commercials which ran like clockwork between the absurd voyeurisms of the day. TV was the glorious peephole of the people. 

I wasn't so inclined to believe any of it. I was more apt to believe I had gone completely mad in my new office job with my lack of success finding you and my observations of a little city sidewalk had morphed into this hysterical hallucination that fed on itself and became an inexorable force. And Orson Welles was on the radio in my mind broadcasting the calamity of current events, a war set to be waged between the Moderners and the Born Again, which was one tragic incident away from exploding and which surely, I felt in my distrust of anyone with political aspirations and power, would soon. 

And that precipitous event came in the form of political assassination. JFK, who had the nerve to ride for a second time in an open-top convertible, as modern journalists criticized in review, through the streets of Manhattan this time, was assassinated by what the Moderners wanted everyone to believe was a Born Again Lee Harvey Oswald, hell-bent on finishing the job he started in 1963. But the few pictures of the person they claimed was Oswald looked nothing like him. It was announced the next day that he had hung himself in his prison cell and everyone was told to believe it or risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" and subsequently labeled a threat to democracy. The Moderners then declared in near collective unison that the Born Agains were the greatest threat to democracy this nation has ever known and must be dealt with accordingly. And also, that anyone who is spreading the lies that Moderners had anything to do with JFK's second assassination, are dangerous and incompetent people who threaten the very fabric of democracy we hold dear to us. 

With that there was a bloodletting. Although highly outnumbered, the Born Agains waged a brilliant war and nearly succeeded, all along attempting to negotiate peace. But Hillary Clinton, US President and Moderner-in-chief, and possibly the greatest war monger ever known to man, waged a relentless and ruthless war and used every resource to rid the Earth of not only the famous, but anyone who had been Born Again. Do your part, she crowed from Pennsylvania Avenue. And by example, she herself killed her own mother in what the modern media heralded as an unprecedented show of courage, sacrifice and resolve. She also had Bernie Sanders killed because she said she thought he had died and was a Born Again, but no one seems to remember his funeral. 

All these events unfolded over the period of a blurry year and I watched them through the eye of a TV, my only portal to that fast-evolving dystopian nightmare, amused at times and disturbed at others. I was a skeptic and more and more as time passed, I grew lonelier for everyone else began to slowly believe that which they were being told. It amazed me how quickly it all had turned. This extraordinary Lazarus Phenomenon, by far the most unbelievable event in human history, had become a frightening plague of degeneracy, evolved into a new unprecedented war, an assault on freedom, and worse than what a zombie apocalypse would have been, they said in an article in The Atlantic, which was parroted on all the cable news networks besides Fox. Fox had been pulled off the air by the FCC for acts of high treason, by order of the state department and to the applause of tens of millions of Moderners who did not see anything possibly nefarious in shutting down an alternative viewpoint. All the journalists who questioned the Moderners motives or incentives were jailed and in jail most of them hung themselves. 

And I watched it all unfold. Witnessed it. Usually in the same bar where people commented as they typically comment. "Crazy world we live in, huh?" Or, "Did you hear about what happened today?" Or, "I'll be happy when all this is over and the world is back to normal. Whoo-whee!" Normal, I cringed. Normal. Normal. It beat emphatically against my brain. It was code for many different things and it did not mean what it seemed to on the surface. And then they looked at me like puritans probably once looked at people who didn't speak out against witchcraft or the accused, and they shook their heads or they invited me for my commentary, but I declined and I took another drink and said nothing at all. But muteness is a crime. Silence is violence, the violent left has embroidered on their throw pillows. I missed the days when we talked about sports, or women, or movies, or being kids. But no one talked about those things anymore. Everyone had eyes like steel traps and waited for someone to slipup, to disagree with the government, someone to identify as an enemy so they could slay them in the life of their opinion and then turn them in to the authorities like a good citizen. 

Then she came. She walked right in the bar as I gazed at the TV wondering what was going to happen next. She sat down and ordered an old fashioned, which caught my attention, and the bartender scratched his head until the memory of making the drink returned from when he worked in a much nicer bar somewhere else. Or at least a bar where people ordered mixed drinks more than beers or shots that weren't the plebian sort like screwdrivers or daiquiris or sex on the beach for the obligatory giggle. They ordered gibson's and white russians and highballs and Tom Collins' and those sorts of things. They don't even have cocktail onions here. And he grinned at her and remarked that she looked familiar and she said she doesn't see how and I panicked because I knew her. I had seen her in a movie. She was Veronica Lake and I was enamored.

"I Married a Witch" was the movie I had seen. I knew she was a Born Again and I can't imagine why she was in my town as it was not a popular destination, by any means. It was a "from" point where people dreamed of other places and other people and things. But here she was and though I still dreamt of you, of meeting you, I knew I was bound to help her because that is who I am. She looked nervous and I glanced at her now and then hoping to conjure up a line or something to talk about, but I couldn't think of anything. After a few drinks I imagined she was here because she wished to be anonymous. And if this town deserved any sort of distinction, it would be as a place where one could drown in anonymity. She was likely on her way to somewhere else. Traveling by bus because the bus station was less than a block away and sometimes there were layovers and bus people would wonder in for an hour or so until the next leg of their trip. Maybe that was why she was checking her watch. 

The news announced that so-and-so was killed on the "War for Soul of America" which was in bold letters on the screen with the music of drums and trumpets everytime they came back from commerical. And she and I both looked like the only two people in the bar who weren't enjoying it. She caught a glance of me and seemed to recognize me as a rare ally in the moment, offering me a nervous smile, and I smiled back at her and raised my glass as though to confirm her thought. Her peak-a-boo hairstyle was shielding her right eye from view leaving the left to appear all the more seductive for it's exclusivity. 

The bartender excused himself to a distant corner of the bar to confer with another who looked clueless, and they appeared somewhat like a bad vaudevillian act from afar, but they gazed at her. I knew it was only a matter of time before they identified her, for although she was in jeans, boots, and a inconspicuous shirt that blended in well with these parts, she was too beautiful for this town, especially for this bar, and the drink she ordered and the way she drank it and spoke made it all too much to believe that she was a Moderner. A born-and-raised Ohioan from the current generation of crass simpletons. It was their patriotic duty, they knew, to call the authorities and that little bone of recognition they would get from whatever authority that would swoop in to arrest or kill her was what they salivated over. See something, say something, all the commercials said. They were law-abiding citizens. 

But amidst some school teacher's wittering about his take on the war to anyone who would listen (though no one was), it became my duty, suddenly, to get her out of their and get her to freedom, wherever that may be. And the TV kept talking like an annoying guest and declared with the haughty air of degenerated national pride, that Babe Ruth was dead. Napoleon was dead. France again belonged to the French people. The EU was restored. The war for the soul of our nation was going well, President Clinton assured us all in her weekly address, but it was far from over. Each of us must do our part! 

And I suppose it was then that I made up my mind about whose side I was on and whose side I wasn't. Ernest Hemingway was dead, the TV went on, and I regretted that I'd never be able to ask him about being raised as a girl, or about his last words, or anything else I've always wanted to ask him. I grabbed Veronica's hand and ran for the exit, pulling her with me just as the bartender raised his phone to snap a picture of her to enter her in the national database or Google face search for answers. What may have appeared to some unaware bar patrons as a simple dine-and-dash was in all actuality a race to save her life. 

But we were thwarted at the door by a cop built like a moose who was coming in as we were exiting. And a throng of angry citizens, patrons of the bar, led by the voracious bartender who was now surer than ever we both were Born Agains, or aiding in the cause, grabbed me and pulled me as the officer took her. Her hand slid out of mine and as we locked eyes I knew that she was you in this life and that it was not the wish to remain anonymous that brought her here, rather it was the draw to me that in the magnitude of its greatness, spawned this entire chain of events. And though I desperately fought my way to her, the forces pulling us apart were too much to overcome. 

I was accused and beaten in the bar and as I defended myself against their allegations, and argued against their groupthink and Cruciblian insanity, I heard two gunshots from outside and all my resistance drained from me for there was nothing left to fight for I knew. And on the TV above where I was being accosted, reports of Veronica Lake's shooting death outside of a bar in an obscure town in Ohio were heralded by a giddy news anchor of an uncertain gender declaring, "This is yet another victory for America!" 

I was arrested and jailed to an indeterminate sentence. Having committed a potential act of domestic terrorism, I was guaranteed no constitutional rights and bond was denied. Trial would be set at a later time I was told. I sat there in jail and imagined having escaped with Veronica. Had the cop not been at the door at that very moment, how it would have all been different. I knew of a cabin where no one stayed. It belonged to one of the lawyers in my office and he rarely went there and often talked about selling it. There was a pond and a pier and a rowboat. I knew the address because I had entertained the idea of buying it if he ever did sell, though I didn't have the money to afford it. It was a nice cabin, miles away from any other inhabited place, and it would have made a wonderful getaway. All day and night the look upon her face as they tore her from me haunted me. Still, in my hand, I could feel hers, slipping away.  

It could not be argued by Clarence Darrow himself that I had not committed an act of high treason and would, if sent to the appropriate jail, find myself involuntarily hung in a cell while awaiting trial. The media was now claiming that the jail suicides were a coordinated act of final defiance and protest against federal authority. They had irrefutable evidence from intelligence agencies and testimony from several anonymous sources, they said.  

But I dreamed of her in jail. While I slept and while I was awake, staring at the white block walls. I dreamed of getting away. That night could have swallowed us as we raced to my car, but I knew I could not drive fast or far enough to get away from them. Anonymity is a dwindling commodity in this nosey world of ours and the only true hope of being and staying anonymous was to be dead and to stay dead. People forget the dead. But people do not leave other people alone. They parade themselves and assail and beat their head against the walls because they want to be noticed, and moreso than noticed, they want to feel special when none of us truly are. To define themselves, they extract and express power in any way they can get it. And if they must kill to express power, then they kill. But there is no power in killing - the born, the unborn, or the Born Again - there is only power in giving life. All that we are are living things, no greater or less than any other living thing - from a grub to a Japanese beetle to a rosebush - and no one has the right to take the life of another and invade one's autonomy the way that we so often do in the wars of violent aggression we wage to topple others and falsely anoint ourselves.  

In my dreams, she held my hand as we drove to the cabin. In that pretend world of my imagination which flourished in a universe on the back of my eyelids. There I am happy. There I am with you. I knew I couldn't return to the world. I knew that I didn't want to. I would never be in the same world again. Not the world that everyone else exists in. I refuse. I dissent. And if my dissent is treasonous, then it is treasonous. I sat in jail for two and a half weeks until I was unexpectedly released. Someone with some pull told a story on my behalf. They said I was trying to help her because I didn't know that she was a Born Again. That I thought she was being falsely accused. It was a lawyer from my office. A friend. The same one with the cabin. The following Monday I went back to work and by Tuesday I was staring out the window again. Wondering. Looking for you.