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Writing this journal seems to have had a most unheimlich effect. I’ve committed to writing in English, but the only word available in its weaker palette is “uncanny,” which pales by comparison. But as Americans would say to cover their lack of thoroughness: Whatever.
Ha, once again, I “bury the lead.” English seems to draw one into digressions, so that even a German slips from directness. For the second time in my life, I have discovered an exceptional person who I am certain is a new evolutionary type!
I realize linking the journal to this event is not rationally justifiable, as correlation is not necessarily causation, and yet intuitively, I sense a relationship that is not, I think, merely coincidental between the journal and the event. The simplest explanation is that I had an unconscious premonition of the upcoming encounter, which spurred me to begin the journal. Now, as Shakespeare might say, the winter of my discontent turns to glorious summer.
Since liberating myself, I’ve been touring the Northeast, an area with a high concentration of elite colleges and universities. I had identified a practical advantage to conducting my search within a few hours’ drive of my home base to enable relocating someone. I was following a northward path when a problem with my new vehicle forced me to divert to Burlington, Vermont. Though the University of Vermont is probably not of sufficient caliber to attract the type I’m looking for, I decided to walk around Burlington while my vehicle was being checked.
In a neighborhood of local shops, I turned a corner, and there I saw him, a boy of perhaps only fourteen or fifteen, working with a middle-aged man to unload beautifully made furniture from the back of a pickup truck and into a store showcasing local crafts. The boy defied my college-student demographic expectations, being inconveniently young and apparently not enrolled anywhere, as he was working in the middle of a school day.
At first, his physical beauty made me wary of another optical illusion effect. It had an unheimlich aspect. It was not just the impossibly golden hair and green eyes—it was as if all parts of him, even the worn denim pants and flannel shirt he wore with sleeves rolled up, glowed with color and aliveness. I’ve never seen such radiance.
Simply looking at him made me feel as if I were included in his mythic life, as if he were Huckleberry Finn passing me on his log raft down the Mississippi. And I felt a poignant Fernweh another German word that has no English equivalent but is sometimes idiotically glossed as “farsickness”—a longing for an unreachable elsewhere. I wanted to float down a slow river with him on such a rustic raft made of unfinished logs—no one else in sight.
I was outside his field of view and away from his line of travel to the front door of the store—nevertheless, he turned toward me—and this was no mere casual recognition—I could tell he was as startled and struck by my presence as I was by his. His dazzlingly green eyes searched mine, in a friendly, inquisitive way.
And then, in my whole body, I felt him reading me. A flicker of alarm passed through my stealthy operator self, but his gaze had a melting warmth that actually made me want to be read, and as soon as I allowed this, we became immersed in telepathic mutuality.
His energy was so different from the Jew, who instantly impressed me as an intellectual equal with a mind full of secret knowledge. But the way this boy read me was not in the detached and analytical way that I do from behind my Leica ML18 sunglasses. What emanated from him was more like a musical waveform imbued with deep emotional resonance and a hard-to-define mythic quality.
Remarkably, though it was a sunny day and I am a notoriously light-sensitive creature, the instant I spotted the boy, I instinctively removed my glasses.
Initially I accounted for this as a desire to hold the boy under naked-eye observation, but now it feels like premonitory intuition. I needed to make my eyes available to him because I sensed the possibility of telepathic encounter.
The boy had an awareness difficult to categorize. Time slowed around him, and he seemed to take in all of me—what we Germans call a gestalt –in a moment. It wasn’t intellectual intelligence, but rather a profound emotional recognition.
He’s not an operator in the way I am, not someone who devises complex stratagems or employs deception. Everything about him was transparent and open for anyone to read, and yet that was not a weakness in his case, because others would be just as transparent to him. Whenever I hear someone call themselves an “empath,” they always turn out to be a self-pitying neurotic soliciting sympathy because they are “triggered” by all sorts of nonsense. But this boy was the real thing, and I got the unmistakable impression he could see right through to anyone’s intentions. If the eye contact lasted any longer, he might have read more than would be safe for him to know at this juncture.
I assumed the man I saw him with was his father, as there was an evident bond of strong affinity between them, something I’ve never experienced myself or even observed between my “peers” and their parents. But I suppose such affinity bonds must exist somewhere.
I retreated from the scene as soon as they entered the store, stopping only to capture a photo of the truck’s license plate. I proceeded down the block till I found a storefront shadowed by an awning where I could observe unnoticed. I pulled out the small Zeiss monocular I keep in my shoulder bag to surveil them.
Once the furniture had been unloaded and brought into the store, they raised the tailgate and drove away. That was my cue to enter the store, where the furniture was already on display along with a selection of exquisitely crafted kaleidoscopes, and—impossibly fortuitous—next to the kaleidoscopes, a stack of trifold brochures containing an intel treasure trove about the boy and the man who was with him.
The man’s name is Matthew, a master carpenter and furniture maker, and the boy, Tommy, is not his son but his apprentice. Tommy. The name suits him well—the name of a wholesome American country boy to my ear. That it might deceive others into seeing him as a simple country boy also pleases me. Tommy is my discovery.
The brochure included a photo of them working side by side in their workshop in a small, intentional community in the Green Mountains. The community is called “The Friends” and is devoted to permaculture principles and nonviolence—typical pious hippie nonsense, all the more reason to rescue Tommy. It also helpfully provided the URL of a primitive website for The Friends community and the crafts and produce they sell with contact information, address—everything I need to begin my surveillance.
Time slows again when I pick up one of the kaleidoscopes and—I realize this could be imagination—but it feels imbued with Tommy’s energy from all the meticulous hand labor he put into it. If necessary, I could probably lift his fingerprints, even his DNA, from it. I bring it to my eye and gaze into the stained-glass portal and see a fractalizing polychrome mandala lighting up like the birth of a new universe.
I hear someone approaching from the back of the store and look up to find an over-friendly older woman, apparently the store owner, walking toward me.
“Aren’t they just amazing!?” she says in an annoyingly loud and exclamatory voice. I notice she is without New England accent and sense she’s someone who came to Vermont in search of quaintness. A voluble sentimentalist no doubt, contemptible, but something I can use. I despise store folk greeting me or asking if I have any questions, as if the possibility of asking a question were something that would never have occurred to me without their prompting. Normally, I flash such intrusive retailers my Germanic death stare to stop their advance, but in this case, I hide my irritation since this woman might possess useful knowledge about Tommy.
“And those were delivered just five minutes ago!”
I take a deep breath to summon the immense energy necessary to animate my charming and ever-so-polite young man character, a laboriously contrived persona I loathe to put on and reserve only for situations where such a distasteful disguise is likely to yield a significant reward. Though I’ve learned to speak English with no hint of German, I decide to put on an egzzagerated Cherman accent and summon a flowery, faux nineteenth-century manner to portray an older American’s idea of an innocent, naïve, but well-bred European traveler amazed by everything in the New World. As I have said, I am a chameleon, and I sense this is the character that will elicit the volubility I require from this chatty woman.
“Oh, how lucky for me! Zese are quite vonderful! I vould love to purchase vone. Such egzquisite craftsmanship. I assume zey vere made by someone local?”
“Oh yes, everything in the store is made by local artisans. These come from The Friends Community in the Green Mountains, and you just missed them.”
“Oh, vat a pity! I greatly admire ze true artisans.”
“Young man, I couldn’t agree with you more. So refreshing to hear from someone your age. We don’t get many young people in here these days. Most of them are just ordering factory-made things online and lack any appreciation or curiosity about finely made handicrafts.”
“Vat a shame! I vas raised by my grandfazer, you know—part of a long line of cuckoo-clock makers in ze Schwarzwald, ze Black Forest region of Chermany. He alvays told me zat if you vant to truly understand a handmade object, you must know ze hands zat made it!”
“Well, I couldn’t agree more, young man! And the kaleidoscope you hold in your hand was made by a remarkable young artisan, even younger than you are!”
“Oh my! Even younger zan me! And to have achieved such superb skill already! Zis must be a most remarkable young person!”
“Yes, he is! Tommy is the sweetest and most polite fifteen-year-old boy I’ve ever met. When I asked Matthew if the other kids at The Friends Community are like Tommy, he gave me a serious look and said, ‘Nobody is like Tommy. He’s exceptional in every way, especially his kindness.’ And get this—at fifteen, Tommy’s already as good at carpentry as Matthew is, and Matthew’s a master! The whole new line of kaleidoscopes was Tommy’s own idea, can you imagine?
“When I asked Tommy why he chose kaleidoscopes, he was just so humble. He said he couldn’t have dreamed of making anything if it weren’t for Matthew’s training. Then he smiled and thanked me for being interested in his work and told me how grateful he and his community were to me for showing their wares. His smile just lights up my whole day.
“What kid talks so appreciatively to adults? And what fifteen-year-old that good at anything refuses personal credit?
“And every time they drop stuff off, every single time, they bring me a gift, essential oils they’ve made, a freshly baked pie, or organic produce. Today, he brought me blackberry preserves he picked and canned himself.”
She points toward an old-fashioned green glass jar with a handwritten label. Tommy’s handwriting. I feel an insane urge to steal this Tommy artifact, but the risk is unwarranted.
“They shouldn’t be thanking me—I should be thanking them. Their crafts are my best seller!”
“Zis Tommy sounds like a remarkable young person indeed—so rare to find such modesty and kindness in zis day and age!”
“So true! But if other young people raised in the Black Forest are anything like you, they must also have wonderful Old-World manners.”
I won’t repeat every bit of this tiresome but info-rich conversation, but suffice to say I greedily devoured every morsel of information she divulged.
So, unlike the encounter with that stealthy Jew in the airport who left not a shred of identifying information, I’ve already been given everything but Tommy’s birth certificate.
As fanciful as this may sound, it seemed part of what I’d felt at first eye contact—of instantly becoming part of his mythic life, a life that seems not of this era but a distant past of farms and carpentry where instead of school, a boy might work as an apprentice living in a tiny community in the woods with his master. Does that not sound mythic in itself?
The oddest thing the shop owner told me was that Tommy volunteers at a hospice where his mother works as a nurse. Why would such an exemplary young person want such a distasteful job of working with old, dying people with their smells and whining? Perhaps it has something to do with his being an empath, but it still seems insanely altruistic. I’m no Nazi, but there is something to be said for eugenics, and offering to painlessly put such people out of their misery, rather than wasting Tommy’s precious time cleaning bed pans and other disgusting tasks. I would certainly put a bullet in my head before I let myself be checked into a hospice. I began to fear Tommy might be highly Christian or something equally abhorrent, but the shop woman told me that though they follow a few Quaker principles, they’re not a religious community.
The few kids who are part of this twenty-person settlement are homeschooled, she added, and their education is mainly through sharing in the work needed to support the community, which lives off the grid.
Of course, I bought the beautiful kaleidoscope so imbued with Tommy’s essence. It stands on my hotel room desk as a Tommy talisman that makes him feel close. If only he were close enough to touch—meanwhile, I have to settle for a wooden cylinder as a surrogate, something to hold on to when I auto-eroticize about him.
The unfortunate news, from the surveillance point of view, is that the shop owner told me the community intentionally lives offline, and she can only communicate with them via email, which they check when they come into town. How I yearn to break into their devices, but there’s not much I can do to hack butter churns or whatever rustic contraptions they use instead of tech.
And yet, these quaint details add to a mythic sense of Tommy as a kind of Huckleberry Finn, a storybook character from an earlier time incongruously living in the present age. He lives in a forest, working with his hands, and only occasionally witnesses the life of a small city when he comes into town to drop off furniture.
Since I knew exactly where to find him, I retreated to my hotel room to see what I could learn online. I soon discovered that his settlement is surrounded by national forest land and is at the bottom of a valley, so it’ll be easy to surveil the community from a high vantage while camped in the nearby woods. I ordered a fabulously expensive Zeiss spotting scope—got to love those German optics—as well as high-end night vision equipment, a tent, and other things I’ll need to hide my vehicle and set up an observation post. Camping is permitted on national forest land, so all of this will be fully legal.
I have a strange feeling that everything’s been set up to facilitate my purposes. On the other hand, finding a way to encounter Tommy again without drawing attention from other members of his community will be tricky.
It’s strange how things work. I thought my search would lead me to another sophisticated operator like myself, and then the challenge would be to stay three or four steps ahead of them to earn their respect. But my strategies and tactics would not work on Tommy. He would simply feel what I was up to and see through to my underlying intentions.
And yet, these aspects of him, so inconvenient to my mode of operation, are at the heart of his unique magnetism. This boy is like a revelation of a principle of nature I hadn’t considered. I assumed attraction would be based on similarity, but the massive dissimilarity of this boy is key to his allure. I don’t want to call it an attraction of opposites as “opposite” is such an absolutism. We do have things in common, as we’re both anomalies and highly tuned in. Mutuality was evidenced by our ability to recognize and read each other immediately.
Instead of finding a slightly lesser anomaly, which would have given me the upper hand, I have found someone as anomalous as I am, but who embodies a different principle of nature. Such an alliance could be even more powerful, but I’m not sure how it would work. Or even if it would work. I’d face the immense challenge of adapting to someone whose nature is fundamentally different from mine.
I must confront red flags about my pursuit of this boy. On the practical level, I haven’t planned for the far greater legal hazards of someone underage. I assumed I’d find someone about my age, probably a college student.
There is nothing I value more than control. Control is implicit in being a predator and operator, and I make no apology for it. I’ve been derisively called a “control freak,” but I own that as a compliment. “Freak” is essentially a synonym mediocrities use for “anomaly.”
And yet, pursuing this boy runs dramatically against my need for control. If only he were eighteen like me, he’d be a free agent. If I persuaded him to join forces, there would be no legal lines crossed. However, as a fifteen-year-old, he’s not the controlling legal authority in his own life. Therefore, relocating him without the written consent of a parent or guardian would involve extreme risks that are hard to justify.
And then, even if I overcame that problem, this boy possesses an empathic awareness that would see through to my intentions, and I’d have no way to control that. Perhaps I could misdirect and deceive him within a short timeframe, but not in any ongoing alliance.
You likely assume from my many bold assertions of superiority that I have the fatal flaw of so many young males who overestimate themselves and what they can do. Actually, part of my superiority is an instinctive caution that leads me to be conservative in my strategies and tactics. I do not presume on luck, and I’m a shrewd realist about how the world works.
Remember, I am not American. I am from the Old World, so I abhor the brash overconfidence of young American entrepreneurs. The media often glorifies the very few who succeed, while ignoring the far greater numbers who fail. Yes, my investments have an element of gambling, but I’ve always been careful not to put my principal at risk, and I’ve become wealthy by meticulously risk-profiling every significant action.
To ensure my safety, I must establish a bright red line in my pursuit. Any notion I had of making the right person a guest in my secure facility is a zero-percent option in this case. Besides the staggering legal risk, he is too dissimilar from me to predict his reaction to such a coercive scenario. The only presently available action that passes my risk profile analysis is surveillance.
Part of me doesn’t even want to make Tommy an involuntary guest. I can tell from his temperament that he would find that alarming and oppressive. Tommy should be handled with gracious and graceful means, as befits his nature, not brute force.
My desire is to make him a welcome guest with me based on his own enthusiasm. I would make over my sub-basement to his liking. I would program the floor-to-ceiling panels to draw the eye into an HD forest with wind blowing through the branches. I would order the finest tools and convert a room into an exquisitely well-equipped woodworking shop so he could pursue his craft. No expense would be spared to accommodate his every need. I note these specifications should circumstances later warrant. My goal is to rescue Tommy from his world of rustic mediocrity, not harm him in any way.
And yet, there is no safe way I can foresee to enable such a rescue without the permission of parents or guardians. The logical question is—given these factors, why am I pursuing him at all? One answer is that I’ve discovered a person who is even more of an anomaly than I was looking for, and I might learn interesting things just by observing him. But the real answer is one I must acknowledge is outside of logic.
A core intuition of significance tells me I am on the right track. The magnetism, attraction, and fascination I have for him are beyond logic, so I must proceed with extreme caution, and this journal is part of that caution. Let me define another red line. I will not consider any action beyond surveillance without returning to this journal for analysis and risk profiling.
My surveillance has already been highly successful, and I have learned a great deal about him with minimal effort and no risk whatsoever. From The Friends website, I learned that their community sells organic produce and handcrafted products at a farmer’s market. Assuming Tommy helps with that, it could be a chance for a brief, casual encounter, though obviously not a sufficient opportunity to convince him he should break free of a life he’s fully invested in. Also, Tommy will recognize me from our first encounter, and he might suspect I’m stalking him. Especially since he’s a tuned-in empath, and I am stalking him.
Worse, even if I convinced him to leave his community and come with me, I’d be transporting him across state lines and committing an intimidating list of felonies. As a minor, Tommy’s consent would count for nothing if his guardians wanted to prosecute me. It’d be far too dangerous unless they gave me written permission, and how would I ever manage that?
But wait . . . now that I’ve posed the question, I see a possible answer. I could propose hiring Tommy for live-in custom carpentry work on my new home. To create a more plausible and wholesome scenario, I’d say that the house was purchased by my parents, and they’d put me in charge of supervising the finish work during my summer vacation from college. I was so impressed with the furniture I saw in the store that I knew they were exactly the craftsmen I needed for the custom cabinet work on-site.
Of course, it would be too much to expect the master carpenter himself to relocate for such a project, but perhaps they’d be willing to hire out the apprentice? They could set the price for his services. The house has several unoccupied rooms where Tommy could stay in comfort. A generous salary, plus meals and expenses included. I could point out that the project would amount to a professional credential Tommy could later add to a CV.
I have to admit, it’s quite a clever solution. I wouldn’t be meeting him again suspiciously, but with a plausible reason, and I actually need custom cabinetry and furniture.
However, the giant flaw in this plan is that they would almost certainly require me to supply them with the house address, so my headquarters and the involuntary guest facility would be known upfront. And this is information I’ve worked hard to keep as unlisted as possible.
They’d probably ask to speak to my parents to confirm this arrangement. No, this is far too risky. I need to continue surveilling, and given how well things have worked so far, there will likely be other unexpected opportunities.
Perhaps someone reading this might think me diabolical for plotting to separate this underage kid from his community. I claim no purity of motivation, but, once again, I have no intention of causing him harm. On the contrary, I wish only to liberate him from a life in the woods of little significance.
Obviously, no one else would see the situation as I do, but Tommy is clearly meant for more than carpentry and farming. His present life is holding him back from a greater destiny. A greater destiny he could find with me. So, if you consider my plans objectively, I have only his best interests in mind.
