It’s going to be hard to put this into words, because it makes everything feel more real and permanent. I just can’t write about the terrible thing that happened, at least not yet. I need to let my past life go because it’s gone. Gone forever. And there’s nothing I can do to bring it back.

The most horrible part is that I’m responsible for what happened. I could have warned them. I was shown exactly what was about to happen, but didn’t believe it was literal. I made a tragic mistake I can never undo. What threw me off is that the last thing I saw in my vision was what looked like a robot holding a gun, and that made it all seem like a dream image, not something that could actually happen.

And yet that is the way it happened, except there was no robot, just Max wearing night-vision gear and camo. But even if the vision didn’t make sense to me, I knew something terrible was coming, and I didn’t warn them.

I just can’t let guilt and grief break me, because that would be the most selfish thing of all. What I hold onto is my mom’s last words, the ones I heard in my head, that I must survive and am needed for something important. What I feel doesn’t matter—the only thing that matters is the strange mission I’ve been given. I must be faithful to it, no matter what sacrifices it requires of me.

There’s a part of me I must fight off constantly because it just wants to collapse in grief. Part of me wishes I was dead too and not the only Friend left. I know from things I witnessed at the hospice that death is not the end but a transition to something else. The Friends still exist, but in some other dimension that’s closed to me. I wish I could be with them wherever they’ve gone, but that longing is horribly selfish too, because I’d be abandoning my mission

My sacred duty is to stay in this world, with all its madness and evil, but with some goodness, too. I must stay true to what I’m needed for. And part of that is to keep making this record for someone else to read one day. I don’t know why that’s part of my mission, but I’m certain it is.

And I also need this journal to keep myself together and have a place to talk about things that wouldn’t be good to share with Max. He—well, he’s so different, not emotional like I am, so he wouldn’t understand, and I have no right to burden him with my stress. I know what the first part of the mission is—to form a good relationship with Max. But to pull that off, I need to pull myself together.

I don’t want to say anything negative about the person who saved my life, but Max doesn’t seem like . . . a well person. I need to be the one to make this a good relationship because I don’t think Max has ever had one.

I must let go of The Friends and the life I’ve lost to become stable. The only way to be loyal to them and make amends for my tragic mistake is to do what my mom said, to survive for something important I’m needed for.

I need to keep my focus on Max and the work I’m doing. I can’t do anything for people and a life that’s gone. My contribution must be made here. Housework, cooking, and making cabinets and furniture may not seem like much of a mission, but for now, it is. It’s something Max appreciates, and it’s all I’ve been able to do so far.

I’ve got to do everything I can to understand Max. When I write things down like this, my thoughts become clearer.

Max is so different from me. Fundamentally different. I need to empathize and see things from his perspective, but that’s hard because he’s so unusual. Sometimes, it almost seems like he actually is a robot, though I know he isn’t. He doesn’t show his emotions the way most people do, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any. His whole mission was to find a friend, what he calls an “alliance.” Deep inside, I feel he’s lonely and desperately needs a friend. He’s not sure how friendship works, but he’s trying his best.

I need to be a good companion to Max, but right now, I feel like I’m only part of myself. I shut off my emotions to focus on work, but that makes me into a kind of robot myself. To be the friend Max needs, I need to become Tommy again, and I must overcome the trauma to do that.

Maybe Max has been traumatized, and that’s why he’s the way he is. But he hasn’t mentioned any trauma. He doesn’t even seem fazed that he had to kill someone. He mentioned his family a couple of times, but in a purely factual way, and he showed no feelings about them except annoyance. Maybe they showed no feelings toward them. Maybe what damaged him isn’t a particular event, but that he’s never gotten love from anyone.

But I think that’s only part of the story. Lots of people don’t get the love they deserve, and they don’t end up like Max. He must’ve been born with his differences. So, I think it’s probably a combination of his nature and how he was raised. He didn’t have the advantage I did of a loving community.

Max grew up as an only child in a rich family, and I’ve heard that some rich people are cold and selfish and not even loving toward their own families. I’m sure not all rich people are that way, but Max is the only wealthy person I’ve ever met. He’s super capable and smart, but he doesn’t feel like a complete person.

A good relationship has to be a loving relationship, doesn’t it? You can’t relate well to a dog or a cat without love. Maybe a pet snake wouldn’t care if it was loved or not so long as you fed it, but warm-blooded social animals need it. Maybe Max isn’t capable of feeling love, because no one has shown him any.

Until a couple of days ago, I was a loving person, but unlike Max, I was raised in a whole community of people who loved me. I didn’t need to shut off my emotions to keep functioning. Who would I be without the community that raised me?

Now I feel lost and hollow because they’re all gone. But at least I know what love is and had a lifetime of experiencing it. So it’s my responsibility to bring love into our strange relationship.

Max probably never had anyone understand him. The more different you are, the harder it is to find someone who can understand you.

That’s why I long for Andrew to find me. When he looked at me, I felt like I was being understood for the first time. That wasn’t the fault of The Friends—they loved me—but they didn’t really get the things that made me different. I guess that was my fault because I didn’t give them a chance. I felt I had to figure out those things myself first before talking to anyone else about them, and now it’s too late.

To create a solid relationship with Max, I need to understand him. But right now, I’m having trouble figuring myself out. I was struggling to deal with my strangeness before, and now I’m not even the same person I was a few days ago.

Trauma changes you. And things have only gotten stranger.

“Okay, calm down, Tommy. You will understand, just give it time.”

That sounded like Dorothy speaking in my head. Is it really her?

“That’s not the most helpful question, Tommy. The Friends are all still within you and always will be. Now you’re in a two-person community, and you can bring everything you learned with us into making this new community healthy and loving. You’re doing that already, Tommy. You’re doing better than you think. Maybe time can’t heal all wounds, but things will get better.”

She’s right. I need to stop panicking. I remember something she used to say. The first time I heard it was when I was six years old and had gotten stung multiple times on my hand and up my arm by a swarm of bees that made their nest in an old stump I found. I was crying and terrified.

“Moment-to-moment, Tommy. And every moment in its space,” said Dorothy.

I didn’t understand what those words meant at the time, but the way she said it calmed me. Later, she told me it was her mantra, something she’d read in a book, and that she says it to herself whenever she feels overwhelmed.

When she saw my perfectionism and self-criticism getting me upset with myself, she used to say,

“Tommy, just do the best you can between now and bedtime. That’s all you can ever do.”

I need to make those my mantras.

Thanks, Dorothy, your wise words will always be with me.

Right now, the best I can do is to just be nice to Max and do work he values.

Dorothy once taught me some things about love that I need now more than ever.

“Love is a verb,” she said, “not a noun. It means doing kind things for people, and sometimes that means doing them even when you don’t feel love. Many years ago, I worked with a stressed-out single mom. She confided in me that she wasn’t sure how much love she had for her kid because he was born when she was still a teenager, and that caused all the fun to disappear from her life. She had to work three jobs, and paying the bills was a constant stress.

“I told her that she was a loving mother because she sacrificed and did all those things. No one can feel loving all the time, especially under high stress, but what counted was that she showed up for her child. Everything she did working those jobs away from her kid was a loving sacrifice.”

I think Dorothy was right. It wasn’t the mother’s fault because she was doing the best she could in a bad situation. But that still wouldn’t be an ideal relationship for a kid. A child needs a mother or someone to show and feel love for them sometimes, or it would be more like a survival relationship. None of that would be the mom’s fault, but it still wouldn’t be healthy.

The problem is that I can’t even love myself right now. I blame myself for not warning them when I was shown what was about to happen. I don’t feel like I deserve forgiveness, but I need to find a way to forgive myself, or I won’t be able to love again.

I wasn’t the one who put that killer in motion. I thought I’d only freak people out if I told them about a vision that seemed absurd. I didn’t know the vision was literal. Seeing what I thought was a robot made me feel sure it wasn’t.

I’m so sorry. I just wish I’d known, but I didn’t. If I had, I would have done things so much differently. How do I forgive myself?

“Tommy, there’s nothing to forgive. You did what you thought was best for everyone at the time. You can never do better than that. None of us knows what’s coming. You are surrounded by unknowns, and you always will be. Just keep doing the best you can between now and bedtime.”

“Thanks, Dorothy. That helps a lot.”

But maybe I’m just putting words in her mouth. The thing is, I did know what was coming—I just second-guessed it, and if I hadn’t, maybe I could have saved everyone.

How can I ever forgive myself for that?

 

 

Sorry about all the frantic rambling in my last entry. I’m a lot calmer now. Work is really helping, and I use those mantras all the time. Sometimes, I say them aloud. Other times, when the pain resurfaces, they come to me in Dorothy’s voice—”Moment-to-moment, Tommy. And every moment in its space.”

And she says other stuff like, “You’re doing the best you can, Tommy, and you’re doing much better than you think. Give it time.”

And when she speaks, it’s like she’s speaking for all The Friends, so it feels like the whole community is supporting me. I also feel like The Friends are with me when I dream. I haven’t been able to recall details, but they assure me they’re alright and encourage me to let go of grieving for them as much as possible so I can focus on my mission.

When I last wrote, I was still in shock, fighting off agonized panic, and it seemed like I’d always feel that way. But it feels like something larger than me is stabilizing me into someone a little more like the Tommy I used to be.

As soon as the supplies arrived, I convinced Max that the best place for the woodshop would be the gazebo, which has windows that can be opened. At first, Max wanted me to work in the house, but I explained that wood dust would fill the air, and he’d be hearing power tools while he was in his office. He saw the sense of that, so now I’m working outdoors with forest all around, which brings me great comfort.

I come in to make our meals. I’ve always loved cooking, and people say I’m good at it. I’m learning all of Max’s very specific food and taste preferences. There are a lot of things Max can’t eat, including foods whose textures repulse him, but I’ve got all that dialed in now.

When I got here, there was almost no normal food. I found cupboards filled with supplements and expensive protein powders with the longest list of ingredients I’ve ever seen, most of them chemicals—synthetic vitamins and weird protein isolates and stuff like that. Max told me that he mostly lives on shakes. He claimed they have every nutrient and said he couldn’t waste time cooking.

He has plenty of money, but the poor guy wasn’t even eating actual meals. Besides not cooking for himself, he also said he doesn’t trust restaurant food. That’s something we have in common. We didn’t have much money, but I grew up eating farm-to-table, organic stuff we grew ourselves, whole foods cooked by people who put love into everything they made. I was constantly schooled in nutrition and plant-based cooking, but I’ve never worked from recipes. I just improvise with whatever ingredients are available. It’s a way I’m following Dorothy’s advice—bringing what I learned with The Friends into our two-person community.

Now that I’ve figured out Max’s likes and dislikes, he praises every meal and hasn’t made a single shake since I got here. He’s eighteen, but it feels like he’s discovering real food and eating meals with someone for the first time.

Max told me that he refused to eat with his parents and never ate lunch at school. He said it’s impossible for him to be with other people when they’re eating. The way they eat and the noises they make disgust him. But I must be an exception because he seems to enjoy sharing meals with me.

Yesterday, I found he’d cleared his protein powders out of the kitchen cupboards and tossed them in the trash. At first, I was horrified because I was brought up to never waste food, but it was just powders neither of us was going to use, and it was a sign that he appreciates my cooking. Maybe even a sign that he’s willing to change a little in a healthy direction.

I’ve already built a composting station outside, and once the cabinetry and furniture are done, I can work on establishing a small permaculture farm on the property, so we won’t need drones to deliver all our produce. Max likes the idea because he’s an extreme survivalist and says we should always be prepared for major disasters.

Max told me about the “Carrington Event” and says a solar storm could wipe out all our devices and end technological civilization, and we should be ready for that and other disasters he calls “black swan events.” He said that essential elements of what he called the “home-base infrastructure” were hardened to withstand solar storms and EMPs. Max loved my idea of using space in the basement to set up hydro and aeroponic gardens to grow stuff in the winter.

A few times every day, Max comes out of his office just to watch me do carpentry. I explain everything I’m doing, and he listens with great interest, but he never touches any of the tools, so I don’t think he wants to learn to do it himself. He always praises the quality of what I produce and says he likes my work ethic and perfectionism. He says he admires high proficiency in anything and takes pleasure in watching me do my craft.

He studies me with fascinated curiosity, and I’m doing my version of that, trying to learn everything I can about him.

There’s one thing I’ve figured out about Max that’s going to be awkward to write about, but I need to. This journal is becoming like a friend I can confide in, and I’ve got to talk to someone about this.

I’m pretty sure Max is attracted to me. Attracted, as in sexually attracted to me. And by “pretty sure,” I mean sure. You can’t be an empath and miss something intense like that.

Max doesn’t say anything about sex and never tries to touch me, but when I come out in a bathing suit to join him in the hot tub, I can feel his eyes on me. It’s not horrible, like what I felt from the killer in the truck or anything like that. But it makes me uncomfortable. What I pick up is a sudden surge of excited desire that feels a bit greedy but also really nervous and even fearful at the same time, like he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings.

And I don’t know what to do with his feelings either. I’m hoping writing about it will help me figure it out, because I have no one to guide me, and no experience.

But it’s not like I don’t know anything. I’ve been aware of different sexualities since I was a child. For example, Dorothy often talked about Jane, the partner she lost before coming to live with The Friends. It’s part of what drove her to find a community. But she wasn’t with anybody during the time I knew her. She used to say the whole community was her partner.

Maybe, in a way, I was like that too. It seems like it would be selfish to put all your focus on one person just because you’re attracted to them. I’ve seen that, and I didn’t like it.

Dorothy once told me something that’s really stayed with me. She said that when she was young, she was desperately trying to be loved, but now she’s found it’s easier and more fulfilling just to be love.

Maybe that’s how I need to be with Max. When I think of Andrew, I kind of desperately want to be loved and understood by him. But that’s not how I feel about Max—all I can do is try to be love around him. Though it’s more like Dorothy’s idea of love as a verb and not necessarily a feeling. A lot of my feelings are still numbed out, so I don’t collapse into grief. The best I can do most of the time is keep doing work that benefits Max.

I don’t know if that’s really being love the way Dorothy meant—it’s just the one thing I can do. But I’ve also learned that being love is quite different from being in love with someone, which can be pretty selfish and annoying to others.

The Friends got outside visitors because Jordie taught workshops on permaculture, and the students who came were put up in guest cabins and ate with us in what we called “The Pavilion,” our circular dining and meeting hall with a ring of windows at the top. Most of the people were pretty cool, and I talked to many of them.

The permaculture students were always given a tour of our community on the first day, including the carpentry workshop where I worked. When they weren’t in training, they were free to wander around and see how we lived and functioned, and if any of them asked me questions, I was always glad to answer.

A group came through last spring, and I first saw them when the tour brought them to our workshop. Matthew gave them his usual talk on how we approach carpentry, what we do to ensure the wood we use is sustainably sourced, and so on. Everybody was listening with interest except this one young couple who weren’t listening at all.

I found their behavior shockingly rude and inconsiderate. They kept whispering to each other and laughing, and their laughter took the form of an irritating co-cackling that rose and fell in the same pattern every time. And then, every so often, one of them would kiss the other, and they were always staring into each other’s eyes and paying zero attention to Matthew’s talk.

The people standing near them were distracted and annoyed, but no one said anything, and it didn’t feel like my place to speak up either. If Jordie had been there, he probably would’ve said something because he was their workshop leader.

Later that day, I was staining furniture when I heard shouting outside, like a screaming match, and that’s not something you’d expect to hear in our community. It’s not like we don’t disagree on certain issues, but I’ve never seen a dispute turn into a public shouting match. The one Quaker ritual we follow is a monthly meeting where anyone, including the kids, gets to speak their mind. There are often disagreements, but it’s always a civil conversation, and we work through things in a reasonable way. If even just one person blocks a consensus on something, they’re always given space to fully express their dissent.

Anyway, I looked out the window to see where the shouting was coming from and saw the same couple acting out this huge drama right in the center of our settlement. They seemed oblivious to the disturbance they were creating in our peaceful little world. They could’ve gone behind a cabin or out in the woods, but it was like they wanted to be on display, because their relationship was the center of the universe, and everything else was just a backdrop.

And what was there to get into such a big fight about while in a permaculture workshop? I heard the girl shout something in a rageful, accusatory tone, but couldn’t make out the words. I opened the door in time to hear the guy shout back, “I didn’t know it was going to be this boring either!”

At that point, the girl turned and stormed off, and he went after her. A couple of minutes later, they took off in their SUV at an insane speed, throwing dust up everywhere.

I rarely get angry except at myself sometimes, but I was disgusted by their behavior. I felt the insult to our whole community. Nobody made them come to that workshop, and if they found it, and maybe all of us, boring, they could’ve kept it to themselves and politely left. What he said and their eat-my-dust screeching exit felt like a giant “Fuck you!” to everything I cared about.

I’m usually shy with strangers, but at that moment, I was hoping they’d forgotten something and would have to come back. If they had, I would’ve walked right up to them and given them a piece of my mind. Even now, I feel pissed off thinking about them.

When I talked to Matthew about it, he just shrugged and said,

“That’s normal behavior for a young couple.”

If that’s what being a young couple is like, I’d rather just be in a relationship with the whole community like Dorothy.

Anyway, that was a big tangent, obviously. Maybe I got caught up in it because I’m nervous thinking about sex, which I’d rather not deal with, but I need to because I’ve got to work through anything going on between me and Max.

I’m a late bloomer—I only hit puberty a couple of months ago in the spring, and it was the same time the disturbing visions and occurrences started coming at me. I already felt overwhelmed, so exploring my sexuality would have been one rabbit hole too many.

To be honest, I’m not even sure if I have a sexuality yet. I find certain people attractive, but I don’t know what I’d want to do with them, if anything. Maybe just closeness and cuddling or something.

The only person I’ve ever felt a strong attraction to, like a soulmate, is Andrew. But it’s not like I was fantasizing about sex. I was more worried about Andrew’s survival because he had such terrible burns. The merger experience with him is the closest I’ve ever felt to anyone. I don’t see how sex could’ve brought us any closer.

I’m not even clear if I have a gender preference. I don’t quite get it. If I really like someone, why is it so crucial what sort of thing they have between their legs?

OK, I guess this is getting embarrassing. Obviously, I’m super naive, but I suppose I’m not the first fifteen-year-old to be confused about their sexuality. And it’s not like anybody is reading this right now. But I do have a weird feeling someone will someday.

Dorothy would say, “Just work with whatever is available in the moment.”

What’s available is my confusion, and I need to work through it to figure out how this is going to affect my relationship with Max.

It won’t be healthy to just step around a secret tension between us like an elephant in the room no one talks about. Something as big as that needs to be brought out in the open at least, doesn’t it? But I can’t just bring it up when I have no clue what I’m going to say about it.

Intuition tells me what I need to hear, which is not always what I want to hear. Right now, it’s telling me I need to be open to something with Max for things to be healthy. It can’t just be this huge tension that never gets resolved. But I’m not ready for full-on sex with him or anyone. I mean, obviously, I can find videos online, so I’ll understand better what to do, but I’m just not clear if I want to do any of it. Does that mean I’m asexual?

I’ve always liked being physically close to people I care about, and I’ve always given hugs. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve often gotten compliments about my looks, but I didn’t connect that with sex.

A couple of days ago, for the first time, I gave Max a hug, and it was quite awkward. I did it only after thinking about it and deciding it was necessary to make things healthier because Max has never even given me a fist bump. You can sense the defensive space around him like a force field. Normally, he wouldn’t want anyone getting close, let alone touching him, but at the same time, I feel he does want some kind of closeness with me.

But as awkward as it was, breaking the ice with that first hug felt like the right thing to do, even though he didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t resist, but it was like he’d never gotten a hug before and had no idea how to hug back. He didn’t pull away from it either, and after we let go, he said, “Thank you,” and then he was really quiet. People don’t usually say “thank you” after a hug, so it must’ve meant a lot to him, or he was just startled and didn’t know what to do or say.

Later, I realized my mistake. I surprised him with a hug, and that was too sudden. I should make sure he knows it’s coming so he’ll be prepared for it. So, I’ve ritualized it. I give him one hug right after I say good morning and another after I say good night. Now he’s come to expect it and actually smiles, and it must be genuine because until I saw it, I wasn’t even sure Max could smile.

It’s obvious he likes me, and he lights up when he sees me, but he can’t figure out how to show it, or maybe he’s afraid it would make him seem weak or something. His normal expression is sort of cold and disdainful, which, along with his super-stylish clothes, is why I thought he looked like a European model when I first saw him.

I know this is another big tangent, but it’s something I remember that keeps coming up when I think of Max, and I’ve learned that when a memory pops up out of nowhere like that, there’s usually some kind of lesson in it related to what’s going on in the present.

When I wrote earlier that I never met a wealthy person before Max, I meant I’d never interacted with one, but when I was twelve, I was once in a rich person’s house.

It was a custom cabinet job for this wealthy couple who lived in a house that looked like something you’d see in a glossy magazine. It didn’t look like a house anyone lived in because there were no personal items anywhere. It had no personality—it was like it had been designed by an architect and interior designer on the condition that the owners couldn’t change a thing. It made me afraid to touch anything like I was in a museum and would set off an alarm if I did.

I think the couple was in their forties, and they looked like they were dressed for a business meeting. The woman wore a pinstriped suit with oversized shoulder pads and a man-sized watch. She was painfully thin and angular and seemed proud of it. You could tell she starved herself to look that way, and everything about her seemed designed to intimidate other well-dressed businesspeople who didn’t have the self-discipline to be as skinny as she was.

When Matthew introduced me, she inspected me from head to foot and said, “Oh my, and isn’t he a cutie!”

But it didn’t feel like a compliment. It felt like I was some kind of merchandise, like a prize-winning poodle.

“Why don’t you go in there,” she instructed me, pointing toward a giant showcase living room, “and watch television while I talk to your boss.”

Her husband didn’t even glance in my direction. Feeling dismissed and insulted, I went where she pointed.

They didn’t offer Matthew or me anything to eat or drink, not even a glass of water, and that’s the opposite of how I was brought up. If anyone visited our community for any reason, we’d always take them to our dining hall and offer them a meal.

One time, Dorothy was teaching me baking in our communal kitchen. She gave me one of the cookies to sample, and I was about to bring it outside when she stopped me.

“Never go outside with food unless you bring enough to share with everyone!”

I instantly saw the rightness of that and never again ate in front of others unless I had enough to share.

The living room was gigantic with a vaulted ceiling. But there was no evidence any living had ever occurred inside of it. There was a brand-new glossy grand piano that looked like no one had ever dared lay a fingerprint on it. I have to admit, the woodwork was super precise, every surface so perfectly shaped that I wondered if it had been made by people or robots. I’ll bet neither of them even plays piano.

Across from the piano was the biggest screen I’d ever seen inset into the wall. The television was on, showing a European fashion show, but the sound was muted.

There was a remote control with a million tiny buttons on the coffee table, but I didn’t want to touch it. I was afraid I’d mess something up and get in trouble. I was also afraid to sit on any of the fabric-covered furniture because it looked so expensive and like no one had ever sat on it. If there’d been any wood dust or anything on my pants, I would’ve ruined it. So, I carefully pulled over a hard chair, memorizing exactly where it was so I could return it to the same spot, and sat before the screen to watch the fashion show.

The screen was so huge that when the models came forward, they were much bigger than me. The show was fascinating and horrifying. Nobody, not the models, the designers, the people interviewing them, or the audience on either side of the runway, looked happy or healthy.

It seemed like everyone there was in an abusive relationship with everyone else who was there. The models looked like they hated life. The outfits they were made to wear were grotesque and ugly. I mean, I like weirdness, but this wasn’t cool weirdness—it seemed sadistically weird. I had the idea that the designers, who had none of the models’ looks, hated them for it and were forcing them to wear these super-embarrassing outfits to punish them for being young and good-looking. The audience appeared to be a bunch of rich people who were there just to take pleasure from watching the models get humiliated.

To keep their dignity, the models held their faces locked into cold, disdainful, haughty expressions as they swaggered down the runway. Their eyes sometimes glinted with rageful resentment like big cats pacing their cage in a zoo, daring spectators to stick their fingers through the bars. They stared straight ahead, never looking at anyone.

It was like the models were saying fuck you to the audience and the designers with their eyes. I felt like I could read what was in their minds, and it was something like—

‘Go ahead, pay me enough, and I’ll wear your bizarre clown suit, but you’ll never look as good as I do.’

To me, it was more like a horror show than anything to do with fashion. The clothing, which I wouldn’t even consider clothing, seemed like a form of abuse. As the show went on, the costumes got more bizarre and hideous, as if it was a contest to invent the most unpleasant and uncomfortable outfit of all time.

Some of the outfits were made of clear plastic with weird things sticking out, and some of the models had to wear wire mesh over their faces.

Who would buy such clothing? If you wore it for any length of time, it looked like it could kill you. Your skin couldn’t breathe encased in plastic or vinyl or whatever it was, and some of the wire mesh and spikes and whatnot looked like they could cut the models to pieces if they stumbled in the towering platform shoes that came with the outfit.

One model had to wear a costume that was actually made of broken glass strung together with wire! It shouldn’t even be legal to make models wear something so dangerous and humiliating, but the well-dressed people in the audience seemed to eat it up.

The sound was still muted, so nothing was explained. It must be something like what WrestleMania is for poorer folks, where people pay to see buff guys beating on each other. I guess this was like a kind of WrestleMania for rich people whose money couldn’t make them young and skinny and good-looking, so they wanted to see people like that humiliated in front of them.

Why would anyone take a job like that? I wouldn’t let someone do that to me for all the money in the world.

The outfits Max wears are not like that, of course. They are actually fashionable and quite tasteful and look good on him. They make him seem like a spy sent from the future. Everything Max wears has a sophisticated Euro-espionage look to it, his own personal style. But his clothes seem too expensive and perfect to wear at home, and he wears a different outfit every day. I don’t know if he’s doing that to impress me, or if he’d be dressing that way if no one was around. I guess if I wore clothes like that, I’d be afraid to touch anything, too. One spill, and you might be out like a thousand dollars.

I wonder if Max was forced to be a fashion model earlier in his life, and that’s why he’s the way he is. He’s proportioned just like those European fashion models, though most of them looked quite a bit taller. Max is thin with chiseled features, and he has the same facial expression of haughty contempt, but it’s not directed toward me. I can tell it’s just his default expression even when no one is watching him.

And he is European, German, so maybe this is normal in Berlin where he grew up? He holds himself with perfect posture and moves with the arrogant swagger of one of those models coming down the runway in a bizarre outfit, trying to keep their dignity by walking perfectly. I can almost see another androgynous Euro model walking several feet behind Max down a runway every time he shows up in a new outfit.

Max is very good-looking but not handsome in a traditional, big, buff guy sense. His look is slightly feminine, delicate, and otherworldly, like David Bowie posing as an alien. He has very light blond hair and large, emotionless blue-grey eyes. He looks weirdly perfect, like a living anime character.

Max doesn’t seem ill, but he also doesn’t seem entirely healthy, and I guess that’s not surprising because he lives in front of screens, and until I arrived, he wasn’t even eating food, only those powder-based shakes. I’d probably look like a space alien, too, if I tried to live off those science-project formulas instead of meals.

He works out every day, but twenty-two feet underground in a gym filled with high-tech machines and a black rubber floor. I grew up in handmade wooden buildings and slept in a treehouse every night. But there’s not a splinter of wood or anything organic in his gym. To me, it looks more like a torture chamber on a twenty-fourth-century spaceship than any place I could comfortably exercise.

Meanwhile, it’s the height of summer outside, with mostly beautiful weather. A few days ago, Max reluctantly gave me permission to go for runs. I had to agree to stick to dirt roads through the woods. Max doesn’t want me visible to any cameras, including car dash cams.

Anyway, I asked him yesterday if he wanted to go running with me. He certainly has the right body type for running, and I thought fresh air might do him good. His reaction made me feel like a cat who had dragged in a dead mouse as a gift for its owner.

“Run outside in the dirt with flying insects swarming around me? No thank you.”

Max can be cold like that ultrarich couple in their sterile mansion, but if there’s one thing he has any warmth toward, it’s me. It feels like an honor because I think I might be the first person he’s ever cared about. Overall, he treats me with perfect respect and manners and listens closely to everything I say. And even when we’re not talking, he watches me with that same fascinated curiosity.

I’ve actually started to warm up to him and feel an affection for all his quirks and eccentricities. I can tell he’s been lonely for a long time and appreciates my company. I’m committed to learning how to relate to him, and sometimes it’s an enjoyable challenge, like figuring out how to socialize with a super-intelligent extraterrestrial who’s trying to pass as a human.

Max doesn’t seem to know how to be friends with someone, but he wants to be friends with me, so I just take baby steps toward getting him to act a little bit more human every day. It’s almost like a science project, figuring out exactly how far I can go without freaking him out.

Yeah, I think I’ll bring up the attraction soon, maybe tonight. I’ll just be very reassuring and tell him I’m not freaked out or anything, but that I’m inexperienced and don’t want to rush into anything, but I’m also not closing any doors and might be open to trying something small to start.

I’m not sure if I’m attracted to him, but I’m not repulsed by him either. He’s quite good-looking but not in a way that’s meant to attract anyone. He’s kinda like that skinny rich lady—his look is meant to intimidate people into keeping their distance.

But he’s not trying to intimidate me. I feel a softening when I approach, almost like he’d prefer not to be inside his diamond-hard, stylish exterior, but doesn’t know how to take it off.

There are even moments when I pick up a vulnerable neediness and sense that he cares very much what I think and feel about him.

If you saw him from a distance, he might actually look sensitive, even feminine, with natural shading under his eyes, like an emo kid from back in the day.

Of course, any stranger who mistook him for a sensitive emo would be in for a big surprise if they came near him. Up close, they’d see the fierce alien intelligence in those blue-grey eyes coldly taking them apart in his mind. Then, they’d probably back away from him carefully like they would from a five-foot-eight-inch praying mantis.

He might look pretty from a distance, but no one with sense would trifle with him. Plus, he’s got a whole arsenal of weapons, including all these super-specialized concealable knives and guns and things. He proudly showed me his collection behind a locked wall panel. I told him I was raised to be nonviolent, and he said,

“Purely for self-defense. I’m not looking for trouble. I just want to be prepared in case it finds me.”

And I believe him. He wouldn’t want to get physical with anyone. He wants to keep people away from him. But anyone who tried to mess with him would probably end up like that killer, dead before they even hit the ground.

Anyway, sorry about all the tangents. I’m nervous thinking about bringing the attraction out into the open, but it’s just going to make me more anxious if I don’t. I’m going to bring it up tonight and hope for the best.

 

 

Holy shit, something super weird just went down.

It began with an unfortunate conflict with Max, which was partly my fault. I acted immaturely, but it’s not like Max was totally in the right either. Then in the middle of our fight, something paranormal happened that caused even more disagreement until we got caught up looking into the mystery of it together. But then came a second paranormal event that might’ve led to a breakthrough or possibly put everything at risk. I’m just overwhelmed—everything keeps getting stranger and more intense!

OK, I’m going to stop and breathe for a minute, and then I’ll write about everything in the order things happened—that’s the only way that will make sense . . .

I think I’ve been guilty of trying to make myself look better in this journal than I really am, because what’s going on inside of me is way more chaotic than I’ve made it sound.

I ended my last entry, early this morning, with what looked like a firm decision to bring up the attraction tonight. I tend to do that, overcommitting myself to things I’m not able or ready to take on, and then I end up feeling disappointed or even angry with myself for not living up to them.

I spent the rest of the day second-guessing my decision and getting super nervous about the whole thing—the attraction and what to do about it. It had me feeling on the verge of a panic attack. The more I thought about it, the riskier it seemed because I really don’t know what I’m doing, or what I’d be willing to do, or how Max would react, or any of it. But it also doesn’t seem healthy to not even talk about it.

I just wish I had someone older and trustworthy still around, like Dorothy, to advise me.

Usually, work calms me. I can get into a zone with carpentry and take pride in being professional and efficient—Max’s favorite word. But today I was horribly distracted and made a couple of stupid mistakes that threw me off my game even more.

I got so mad and frustrated with myself that I had to stop and walk around the compound a few times. I decided to shift to simpler tasks, gave up on making cabinets for the day, and worked on house cleaning and food prep.

It’s not like the house needed cleaning, but no amount of cleaning is too much for Max. I realized this from the first time I saw his home. I guess it’s my home now, too. Max is an extreme clean freak. Everything he owns looks either brand new or kept in immaculate condition, and all his stuff, even supplements in a cabinet, is lined up perfectly with the tallest in a back row, then medium-sized ones next, and smaller ones in front like a class photo. At first, it seemed a bit insane, or like maybe he’s addicted to compulsive rituals. But then I saw it was an efficient ordering scheme so all the labels would be visible. I’ve learned some psychiatric stuff, part of my hospice training, and if Max isn’t OCD and on the spectrum, then no one is.

I’m super careful not to mess with any of his ordering schemes. I try to keep everything almost inhumanly clean, which Max appreciates. I don’t mind adapting to Max’s standards because I’m something of a perfectionist myself, and I like doing any kind of physical work because it’s calming and lets me feel useful. Also, Max has given me all kinds of gadgets he already had in unopened boxes—earbuds and such, so I can listen to audiobooks or music when I work.

Since I was too distracted for carpentry, I cleaned both levels and the gazebo, making sure every surface—and even the elevator—was spotless.

After dinner, our ritual is to go out to the hot tub and talk. Max is always out there before me. This could easily be explained because I’m the one who cleans up, but tonight, I thought of a different reason that made me resentful. While changing, it occurred to me that Max probably goes out there first so he can enjoy watching me walk from the elevator to the hot tub in the skimpy bathing suit he gave me.

The thought of this made me kind of mad. It’s like he’s making me walk a runway, like one of those Euro models, while he sits in the hot tub facing the house, watching me approach. I always feel his eyes on me, and sometimes, it feels greedy and unpleasant.

My heart is pounding during the elevator ride as I think about it. Usually, I carry a neatly folded towel in my hand, but this time, I decide to wrap it around me to hide as much of my body as possible. But just before the elevator door opens, I second-guess myself and pull the towel off. It might give away the game. Max might realize why I’m doing it, which could make him angry and would let him know I’m aware of the attraction in a bad way.

My nervous indecision leaves me feeling disgusted with myself and him. I’d more or less decided not to bring up the attraction tonight because I felt unprepared, and it seemed too risky, but now I’m second- or third-guessing that because if I don’t bring it up, it’s just going to keep eating away at me and making me more anxious, so I’d rather just get it over with, but now that I’m riled up about it, I’m likely to make a terrible mess of things.

I carry the unfolded towel in my hand and walk with determination toward the hot tub, looking straight ahead with no expression, like one of those models.

The view from my side of the hot tub is of the woods, which are filled with fireflies, so it looks like an enchanted forest. Max gives me a little time to settle into the hot, bubbly water before he starts speaking. I would’ve preferred more silence to calm myself.

“Major new developments in the Middle East today,” Max begins.

I guess it’s not his fault, but he really doesn’t know how to make friendly conversation. I mean, a normal person would probably start by asking how my day was or something. Of course, on this day, I couldn’t have answered honestly without talking about the elephant in the room we’re not talking about.

The last couple of days, to fill the silence, Max has been briefing me on world affairs as if that’s what’s expected when you’re with someone in a hot tub. I didn’t mind it that much before today. Max is a speed reader who consumes amazing quantities of information daily. He seems to know something about nearly everything. He can go into infinite detail on anything I ask about. He’s like a teenage college professor. I sometimes think of him as Dr. Max. But I’m not making fun of him. I feel like being around someone that brilliant is making me smarter too.

I never paid as much attention to politics and current events as I probably should have. Whenever I did, I became upset and anxious about all the terrible things going on. I also felt helpless to make any difference. I’m not old enough to vote, and most of my time was already committed to the work I did for our community and at the hospice, where I could actually do some good.

Max’s knowledge of the world is comprehensive, and I’m always willing to learn about anything. You can pick any country, and Max can tell you everything going on there with the economy, political factions, mineral wealth, industries, demographics, and simmering tensions with other countries—you name it.

But this time, I’m anxious about whether or not to bring up the attraction. I’m trying to pay close attention to what he’s saying, but at the same time, I’m wishing we could talk about something else, especially anything related to us.

All I’ve really understood so far is that some Middle Eastern fanatics have been launching drone attacks on U.S. military bases over there. So, I force myself to focus and follow along.

“The problem,” Max says, “is prominent voices in the government and media are calling for a proportional response, and that is a mistake. Many Western governments are too predictable and measured in their responses, allowing adversaries to know exactly how much they can get away with.

“I agree with the Madman Theory of the Nixon administration. Nixon and his foreign policy team purposefully created an impression that he was irrational and volatile, which made adversaries nervous about taking provocative actions. I think the Israelis have the right idea in dealing with Islamic factions that have a murder-suicide ideology, which welcomes martyrdom. You cannot just react to a provocation—you have to massively overreact, or it will just keep happening.

“We should not be taking time out so we can carefully consider a proportional response, because that makes us look weak. They want to bring the world back to the eighth century, when Islam had conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen, two and a half times the size of the Roman Empire. You can’t negotiate with an intention like that. If they want to live in the eighth century, we should bomb them back into it. Massive force is the only thing they will respect.

“As Machiavelli said, ‘A man must be caressed or crushed. Do him a small harm, and he plots his revenge. If you need to injure an enemy, do it in such a way that you cripple any possibility of vengeance.’ The way the Mafia applied this was by killing not just a man but his sons as well.

“It is a perfectly logical strategy. Weak vengeance that allows the other party to respond in kind just perpetuates the cycle of violence. This is why a response can’t be proportional—it has to be massive and devastating when dealing with such a murder-suicide ideology. You cannot just punish them a little. You must disable their ability to strike back.”

“Well, I was raised to be nonviolent,” I say, barely even stopping to think, “so I’m not down with bombing people back to the eighth century or whatever.”

I realize how dumb my comment sounds after I say it. I’m just impatient for him to stop talking for a minute so I can settle my nerves and let the hot, bubbly water relax my body. It’s not like I was trying to make a foreign policy statement. I’m just not in the mood to hear about the need for massive airstrikes in the Middle East with so much else on my mind related to what’s going on here.

“Yes, you have told me about your belief in nonviolence before,” says Max, impatiently, “but don’t you think that is a rather oversimplified and unrealistic ideology? Look at what just—” he stops himself, takes a deep breath, and says, “My point is, we live in a complex and dangerous world, and nature rewards energy and aggression. Passive nonviolence is not a successful coping strategy.”

It’s obvious what Max was going to say—’Look at what just happened to your community’—but he held back out of consideration for my trauma. I don’t stop to credit him for that because I’m a chaotic, nervous wreck, and now it feels like he’s just made my whole community look stupid for not having firearms to defend ourselves. Of course, he didn’t actually say that, but I’m flustered and riled up, so I lash out.

“Yeah, Max, you might be right in some ways, but it’s easy for you to sit up there in your office, surrounded by screens, thousands of miles from where the bombs will fall, and decide we should have massive airstrikes. It might be logical or strategic or whatever, but I can’t help but think about a mother finding her kid buried under rubble and—”

I see something lighting up above the treetops to my left and turn to look.

“Holy shit, what is that?”

Max swivels around with lightning speed as if it was an incoming missile strike, and then we fall silent in awe as the blaze of light resolves itself into . . . a saucer-shaped craft hovering above the woods.

It’s pulsating with colored light, shifting from yellow to orange. Then, another saucer approaches it from behind, glowing a pale green.

Max is out of the water in an instant, retrieving his phone and crouching low to shoot video from within the open gazebo windows.

I also get out of the hot tub for a better view.

Max must be working the outside cameras from his phone because they pan toward the glowing disks.

Beams of light emanate from the bottom of the saucers, projecting down into the forest. They were hovering when they emitted the beams, but now they’re moving in a semicircle around the compound. Perceptions about them flash into my mind—it doesn’t feel like they’re spacecraft but living creatures wanting to make contact. They pause, send more beams down into the woods, and then shoot away from us at amazing speed, vanishing beyond the horizon.

A voice in my head says something weird about them, but I don’t have time to think about it. I look at Max, who is still crouched low, his eyes deadly serious and alert, waiting to see if anything else is about to happen. When it doesn’t, he blinks and turns toward me and says,

“I’ve been researching such phenomena for years, but this is my first sighting.”

“They were beaming light down to something in the forest,” I say. “I want to go out there and investigate.”

Max looks at me with alarm.

“Tommy, no. Absolutely not. I forbid it,” Max says with a finality that pisses me off.

“You forbid it? What the hell, Max—you’re not my parent or guardian. If I want to investigate, I will,” I reply. I’m feeling a surge of rebelliousness, but it’s not like I’m going to run out there in my bathing suit.

“I apologize. I should not have put it that way,” Max says, and I can see he knows he messed up—his face is even a little flushed.

“I guess we are all in danger of reverting to our parents under stress. I respect you as an equal. But please, just listen to me for a minute. I know something about this.”

Max gestures toward the hot tub. I notice him dialing the temperature down a little, and I join him back in the bubbly water.

“The history of people encountering such objects is incredibly varied and often not benign at all,” he begins. “There are well-documented cases of radiation burns, brain damage, and even death.

“Reports about the so-called greys suggest they are biosynthetic clones with a hive consciousness. If threatened, they can secrete substances that cause lethal allergic reactions capable of destroying the immune system of humans who make unwanted tactile contact. These secretions leave a powerful, lingering odor that is perceived as having elements of ammonia and sulfur. Even those who are not subject to direct contact may develop autoimmune disorders just from the presence of these visitors in the environment.

“Close encounters often result in serious psychological trauma and disorientation. Whatever these visitors are, they are able to manipulate our perception on every level, so what you experience is what they want you to experience, which may be highly deceptive. Also, people who have encounters seem to be marked in some way and will likely have more such contact, compounding the trauma.

“I felt them wanting to make contact,” I reply. “I can’t define all my perceptions, but it seemed like the two saucers had different personalities or essences, like they were living entities. I think it’s part of the evolutionary experiment, and maybe they left something or someone out in the woods. I appreciate your cautioning me, Max, but I’m willing to put myself at risk. Everyone I loved is gone. The only reason I’m alive is to fulfill some kind of important mission, and this feels related. That’s what my intuition tells me.”

“Tommy, all these intuitions and perceptions you are having about them are likely manipulated. You have no idea what you might be getting yourself into. Even if I went with you fully armed, I would have no way to protect you. Whatever their nature, they take away all human control. They have done it to fighter jets and whole military facilities. They can paralyze your body, take over your will, and drastically manipulate your consciousness and memory. There are many reports of traumatic procedures, including taking genetic material, especially sperm and eggs, and sometimes leaving implants made of anomalous materials. To further their experiments on people or animals, they can warp space and time, triggering a disabling shock from which many never fully recover.

“Don’t be like that one kid in a horror movie who wants to rush into the house where chainsaws are whining. I am trying to protect you.”

Max’s last statement seems genuine, so I back off and offer a compromise.

“OK, Max, I won’t go out there tonight. But I’m not making any promises if they come back. What do you think they are, and why have you been researching them for years?”

“Your second question is easier to answer,” Max replies reflectively. “It might be what you would call an intuition. I became fascinated as a boy, and like many who know little of the subject, I assumed we were getting visited by an extraterrestrial civilization.

“Also, ever since I was a child, people have told me I seem like an alien, so maybe that influenced my interest as well. I didn’t like those around me or the life they enforced on me, so I had a childish notion that if there were super-intelligent aliens out there, maybe they’d take me with them.

“And yes, my obsession with the subject no doubt influenced the architectural design of the home base with its three saucer-shaped structures. If we wanted to be silly, we could imagine that those shapes attracted them here.

“My hopeful boyhood vision of benign extraterrestrials that might rescue me from my mundane life was soon crushed by research. Studying this phenomenon is not like investigating anything else.

“Normally, the more you research something, the more you know, but with ufology, the more you look into it, the more lost you become. Even if you keep to the best sources, you find yourself in a carnival mirror maze where every viewing angle distorts your vision in a different way. Some ufologists have speculated that the absurd and incomprehensible presentations are purposeful. They may be intentionally creating grotesque and inconsistent phenomena as a form of deception, or as a way of expanding our collective consciousness through paradox, like Zen koans or quantum mechanics, to force us to think out of the box and embrace the unresolvable strangeness of the cosmos.”

As with other times when I’ve asked Max questions, he’s in his Dr. Max organized lecture mode, but this time, there’s a passionate edge to it. What he says is fascinating, so I don’t interrupt.

“ETH, or the extraterrestrial hypothesis, is one of many possibilities I will not rule out, but it does not begin to account for the full range of the phenomena. If ETs wanted to colonize the Earth, they could have done it a long time ago. If they wanted to genetically sample our species, they could have accomplished that in a week. Much of what they do or how they appear is bizarre and seems more about psychological manipulation than a rational, scientific program with specific goals. The so-called post-modernist approach is not to resolve who they are, but to ask what effect they’re having on collective consciousness.

“I have investigated and catalogued all the theories, and it is hard to dismiss any of them because we do not know if the highly varied phenomena have a single source or many. None of the single-source theories covers all the findings.

“Some claim that it is secret military tech, but that does not explain how the same sort of craft—able to make right-angle turns and do things impossible with classical physics—appeared in the fifties and likely much earlier.

“Another theory is that they are a future evolution of Homo sapiens time traveling into the past to make interventions.”

“Time travelers—that’s really interesting,” I say. “What sort of interventions?”

“The time traveler hypothesis offers a number of motivations. One is that they have reached an evolutionary dead end and want to change that by changing us and thereby altering their own future. According to some testimony, they have become genetically nonviable and need to hybridize with us. Other reports suggest that they are the unfortunate result of disasters we are going to create, like nuclear war, and they are trying to alter their past to prevent those.

“Some of the best-documented cases here and in Russia report them shining beams down into nuclear weapons facilities, activating or disabling electronics. Multiple sources confirm a case in the Soviet Union, where they entered launch codes and armed a nuclear ICBM, apparently allowing frantic military personnel to cancel the launch only at the last minute.

“Close encounter communications often include harsh warnings about extinction based on nuclear war or environmental destruction. The motivation behind these warnings seems to be that losing us as a viable species threatens their interests.

“A theme emerging from close encounter testimony is that they are dependent on us in some way. They need our genetics to make themselves viable, or they have lost their ability to experience emotion and feel alive due to becoming increasingly biosynthetic.

“People are sometimes given what seem like prophetic visions, but these may include disconfirmed end dates and other absurdities. Some encounters induce a dangerous religious mania, which can lead to saucer cults, while others create disabling ontological shock.

“Often, they seem to have a hive mind and collective telepathic awareness, and act like drones that can be clumsy and unintelligent when dealing with spontaneous human individuals. Their bodies appear to be bioengineered and may function like space suits or containers housing a distributed consciousness.

“Another whole body of research involves cattle mutilations that sometimes leave hard anomalous evidence like calf fetuses intricately dissected inside an unbroken amniotic sac. Cuts are exact in a way we could only do with laser scalpels, and some procedures could not be reproduced by any known medical technology.

“In most cases, the mutilated bodies have had all blood drained, not a single drop spilled, and no tracks of any kind near the corpse. It appears that they were operated on remotely and then returned to the ground from above, as if the evidence were being left intentionally.

“There have been mutilations of other animals like cats and horses. There are also rare but horrifying cases of human mutilation where the entire spinal cord is removed.”

“Damn, Max, that’s pretty horrible. But doesn’t the government investigate these mutilations?”

“The government is mixed up in all of this, discrediting witnesses and creating a smokescreen of misinformation. Mutilations have been investigated by local law enforcement and the FBI. They sometimes float rumors about Satanic rituals and so forth, but there has yet to be a single arrest. There are also notable cases, with varying levels of credibility, of those who claim to have worked in secret government programs reverse-engineering alien spacecraft or to have seen live or frozen aliens.

“Other cases connect the supposed aliens with death and argue that they are dead people come back as shape-shifting entities, perhaps appearing as a form of plasma. Carl Jung thought they might be exteriorizations of the collective unconscious, but also partly physical. He called them psychoid—a state between psyche and matter. You can find evidence for almost any theory you can think of.”

“Wow,” I reply. “I’ve heard about aliens, but I had no idea there were so many other possibilities. I’ve actually had strange experiences related to one of those theories. At the hospice where I volunteered, I’ve watched dying people appear in shape-shifting forms. Sometimes, it’s how they must have looked in their twenties, when they were perfectly healthy. It’s like now that they’re out of their old bodies, they naturally choose the best version of themselves. Other times, I’ve seen them turn into an amorphous light, like the aurora borealis, which I got to see a couple of winters ago.”

“The aurora borealis is plasma,” Max points out. “There are many connections between these phenomena and plasma. My speculation is that it is a form of matter closer to the psychoid.”

“Well, I don’t know if what we saw tonight was anything physical,” I reply, “but if my intuition is worth anything, I don’t think they were metal spacecraft because they felt alive and like they had different essences. I heard something in my mind, a kind of description of one of them, but it didn’t feel like it came from me, at least not from my usual consciousness. Maybe it was my subconscious speaking or something.”

“What did it say?”

“It said, ‘hungry soul glowing in the night of time.'”

“That was about the first one, but the pale green one felt like it had a different purpose and was alive in a different way. Its nature was more hidden or something. I also had a weird sense that it was aware of me, like it knew me somehow.”

We silently contemplate that for a while until an intuition seems to come bubbling up from the water.

This is the moment to talk about the elephant.

Why this is the moment, I don’t know. Maybe it’s better for shocks to come together.

“I feel what just happened is related to our evolutionary experiment,” I begin, “but there’s an element in our experiment we haven’t talked about. I’m not freaked out by it or anything—I think it’s totally natural—but I sense you’re attracted to me. And I just think it would be healthier to get it out in the open so we can talk about it.”

Max stares at me, his eyes intent, but his expression is hard to read.

“What you say is true,” says Max slowly and carefully, and I can tell he’s really nervous. “I knew it was something that could not be hidden from an empath, but I wasn’t sure what would be the right time to bring it up. You had just been traumatized, and I didn’t want to create an impression that I was trying to . . . coerce you into anything. I respect you as an equal, and that means I respect your boundaries.”

Max pauses, collecting his thoughts. “It’s not just an attraction based on looks, though you certainly are beautiful, and that is part of it, but by no means all of it. It is an attraction I have only experienced a couple of times before toward individuals who were both beautiful and anomalous. But I do not make the assumption that my attraction is . . . returned.”

When Max says ‘returned,’ it’s almost scary—his voice contorts with tension—and I sense his terrible fear of rejection and . . .

Something strange is going on with our eye contact.

I should be responding to what he’s said, but I can’t because . . . all the colors are changing, and Max’s face is morphing. His eyes are huge, and everything else becomes a color-shifting backdrop.

My mind no longer forms words as I’m overwhelmed by waves of energy flowing between us. It’s something like what happened with Andrew, but way more chaotic. With Andrew, it was like this mutual welcoming, but Max is desperately trying to escape.

Max radiates alarm, building toward panic like a silent scream.

He looks away, and the moment our eye contact breaks, the experience ends. Gentler waves of energy still flow between us, but all the visual weirdness disappears.

Max’s head is bowed, his eyes wide with shock. He’s trembling and seems unable to speak. His body is hunched over, and this makes him look skinny, even frail.

A need to comfort him brings me to my feet, and I ask him if I can sit beside him. His eyes are cast down, and his expression is haunted. He nods almost imperceptibly. I sit beside him and then slide closer so our legs are touching, and slowly, so as not to startle him, wrap my arm and open hand around his hunched shoulders, holding him close to me. A tremor runs through his whole body, and he takes a deep breath.

“We’re okay,” I say, “everything is going to be okay, Max. We just had another strange experience, but I’ve had that kind of energy flow before, with someone else, and nothing bad happened. Trust me, everything is going to be alright.”

I’m not even thinking about what I’m saying. I’m just following an instinct to comfort him because right now, Max seems like a traumatized child.

His intimidating personality has cracked off him like a shell, and what’s inside is frightened and unformed—a frail, even sickly child, like a hatchling bird fallen from its nest. The change is too startling for my mind to take in, so it steps aside, and my hospice worker self takes over to comfort this fragile kid.

“I’m not sure who I am now,” Max whispers. “I’m not myself anymore.”

“You’re still you, Max. This is just a different part of you. A part you’re not used to.” I’m trying to reassure him, but he’s lost in his own reflection, and my words have no effect.

“You’re . . .” Max begins haltingly. “You’re changing me. Your presence, your energy, it’s . . . changing me.”

Max’s body unhunches, and I sense fear—it’s almost like he’s accusing me of breaking him.

It’s time to give him space. I remove my arm and slide over to the other side of the hot tub.

Max splashes water onto his face and shakes his head like he’s trying to wake himself up. He blinks hard. I can feel his mind turning on, reaching for distance to understand what’s happening. I take some deep breaths, trying to calm myself too. He needs me to be a reassuring presence.

Everything feels super unstable. Saying the wrong thing could have terrible consequences, so I remain silent, letting him compose himself. Instinctively, I work on containing my energy because I sense Max needs separation now.

He looks at me warily. As much as I’ve withdrawn, my presence is still threatening to him, almost like he’s seeing me as some kind of alien. But at the same time, I sense he needs me to remain where I am to witness and support this shaky, in-between self coming into being as he gazes up at me.

“From that first night,” Max begins, in a nervous tone, “I sensed you changing me. In the car—I’d never been close to such intense emotion. I had strange sensations, like I was beginning to resonate with your nervous system and . . . what you were going through was so intense—it was like your story—your life was . . . more real than my own.”

The way Max is talking scares me. I can’t tell if he’s angry or afraid of me, maybe jealous in some way, like he’s accusing me of being better than him, and at the same time, he seems to be hating on himself. For the first time, he’s revealing his inner feelings, and it’s . . . disturbing.

“I seemed hollow, like my whole personality was just a placeholder, a contrived identity, a flimsy image of who I thought I was. And you seemed so different. Who you were and are on the outside is who you are on the inside. You’re a congruent being, while I’m an incongruent creature, a chimera, an armored shell outside and some kind of . . .”

Max’s face contorts with disdain.

“. . . some kind of weakling within.”

The word weakling—the way he says it, the self-hate behind it, is frightening, and I realize I have to say something but I don’t know what I’m going to say until I say it.

“No, Max. No! You’re the man who saved my life! Don’t call what’s inside you . . . I won’t even say it because it’s not true. Your inner self is not that—it’s more like a deprived and neglected child you need to protect and nurture. You can’t disown the inner part of you—if you do, you’ll . . . It won’t be good, Max. It will put you on a terrible path. Please, believe me.”

Max stares at me, startled by my intensity. Then he breaks eye contact, bows his head, and splashes water on his face again.

“I am not even sure what I am saying right now,” he says. “My judgment is addled.” He takes a deep breath. “You are changing me, but I am not saying it is your fault. It is not something you are doing to me—it is just how your being is affecting my being. Maybe that is the evolutionary experiment.”

“Yes, Max. That is the evolutionary experiment. And an evolutionary experiment is not supposed to be stable or comfortable—it’s supposed to break apart stability to create change. It’s a metamorphosis, like . . .

“Jordie—someone I grew up with—showed me something a couple of summers ago. We were working by the edge of the woods, and he found a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. While I watched it break free, Jordie told me about the stages of the metamorphosis.

“Within the chrysalis, the caterpillar starts to form a new kind of cell. They’re called imaginal cells, and they’re like the seeds of the butterfly. At first, the old cells of the caterpillar attack the scattered imaginal cells as if they’re cancer. But the imaginal cells persist and begin to join together, vibrating at the same frequency. They exchange information with each other and organize themselves into different parts to create something new—the butterfly.

“Your inner self—it’s in a fragile, unformed state, but it’s like the imaginal cells of your future self, Max. Don’t fight the metamorphosis—it’s not supposed to be comfortable, but now that it’s started, you’ve got to let it happen.”

The words pour out of me, almost breathlessly, and I realize I’m being too intense and not giving him enough space. I stop talking, lean back against the wall of the hot tub, and study him, trying to gauge where he’s at.

Max’s blue-grey eyes are in a trance-like state of higher thinking and analysis. He seems like a scientist studying the turbulence of the bubbly water on the verge of discovering something. I watch him, fascinated, feeling the field of his intelligence boosting my mind.

Eventually, he looks up, his expression calm and collected.

“I must admit, Tommy, your metamorphosis hypothesis does appear to account for all the facts,” says Max in a tone of grand summation. “And now, I am ready to get out of this hot tub. I turned the temperature down before we got in, sensing a long conversation was imminent, but one more minute and I’m going to dissolve.”

I laugh nervously, stand up, and reach for my towel. It’s a relief to get out of our bubbling, evolutionary cauldron.

When we return to the house, I sense we need our own spaces. I wish Max goodnight and give him a hug, which he accepts, but I feel fear of rejection in him, like an icy splinter in his heart. So, after we let go, I put my hand on his shoulder and say, “We’ll figure it out, Max.” He nods and says, “Thank you.”

I go to my room to write up what just happened. When I’m done, I turn off my computer and the lights and go to sleep. As it turned out, still another paranormal encounter was to come later that night.

 

 

 

Sometime in the middle of my sleep, I awaken into slow time, feeling a protective presence nearby watching over me. Opening my eyes, I find a boy about my age and size sitting patiently on the floor about three feet from my bed. This boy is luminous in the dark and not solidly physical—something like the way Andrew seemed when he came to me, but more glowy, and yet his form is more stable than Andrew’s was, like he’s used to showing up this way.

His presence is gentle and compassionate, and though he appears to be my age, his large blue eyes seem wise and knowledgeable, more timeless than young in the usual sense. He also feels familiar, as if I’d encountered him in my dreams, but can’t quite remember.

He’s waiting in a respectful, unhurried way, like he’s giving me time to study him and decide if I want to interact. I sense his good intentions and that he has messages for me, but he won’t speak unless I grant him permission to communicate, so I greet him in the way I did with Andrew at the treehouse.

“Hey, I’m Tommy. Welcome. What’s your name?”

“Thank you, Tommy. I’m Alex.”

He seems bound by some sort of honor code, only answering what’s asked, so I ask another question.

“What brings you here, Alex?”

“A long journey. In another time, you saved me from falling into an abyss, but later, I foolishly chose to return to that darkness, a realm some call the Lower Astral. When I fell back into that hungry darkness, a member of a Guild came forward to protect me, and in time I became part of that Guild. We are a group of souls who are trying to make amends for lives that ended or that we ended . . . poorly. Sucktacularly poorly in my case. But we have a serious mission, helping the living in a way that also helps us. We seek to be symbiotic with the living.”

Now I realize Alex is a spirit. But he seems so alive, and I see the quick and quirky teenager he must have been. Somebody who could have been a great friend.

“Yeah,” says Alex, picking up on my thoughts, “you miss a lot of opportunities when you take your skin out of the game. But you live and learn—or die and learn in my case. Gotta go the distance. Like they say, If you’re going through hell, keep going!”

“But wait, you said I saved you?”

“Yeah, but a different version of you. I think you’re aware of him.”

I nod.

“I owe you protection, Tommy, for the great kindness you showed me. These visitors, if that’s what you want to call them, have your number, so I thought I should tell you something about them. But fair warning first. This is some deep, creepy knowledge about strange parasitic life forms. Only you can know if it’s right for you to hear about such things. When I was fifteen, it would have freaked me the fuck out. You’re a lot stronger than I am, but I can’t share any of this without your consent.”

“I’m willing,” I reply. “It’s better to know than to be ignorant of what’s out there. I’ve already had a vision of an evil entity that wanted me to know about itself. It’s my responsibility to know, even if it is scary.”

Alex nods, acknowledging my consent.

“I saw you and Max react to your sighting this evening. You told him you might go out and investigate if they returned. Even saying that is dangerous because it invites more contact.

“A lot of Max’s warnings were pretty right on from my experience. Some of what Max called visitors can intrude without permission, but what you said comes close to beckoning them back, which increases the likelihood of more encounters. That’s not in your best interests, because some visitors are dangerous parasites.

“Of course, I’m a visitor too, so only you can decide if I should be trusted. A good friend of mine sometimes quotes Terence McKenna—

It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure that it is telling you the truth, because the demons are of many kinds: ‘Some are made of ions, some of mind; the ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.’

“So, some visitors are fabrications of your mind, some are blind, some malign, some benign, and you have to trust your own intuition to tell the difference.

“But I digress—when you die you digress, I guess—not that I had a particularly organized mind when I was alive. What can you expect from a high school dropout dead kid raised on video games, weed, and ultra-sour candy?” says Alex with a crooked grin.

He’s showing me his playful side and quicksilver mind, but I sense he’s doing this out of consideration for my age and the darkness of his news.

“I do trust you, Alex,” I say. “And I trust my intuition to know the difference.”

“Excellent. I can tell you have great intuition, Tommy—I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Anyway, back to the parasitic kind of visitors. Some are little more than automatons, but those who have individual consciousness suffer from a kind of . . . time curse.”

A haunted look comes over Alex, but he pulls himself out of it quickly.

“Lower-astral time has no vitality or sense of movement toward anything—it just is. Lost souls crave the emotion and excitement of the living, whose existence unfolds like stories in linear time. When a living person gazes into the eyes of a lost soul, they sometimes perceive the time curse. They may feel the whole arc of their lives, including their death, reflected in the eyes of the lost, and this is deeply disturbing.

“Some of the lost would like to attach themselves to you lifelong, as if they could hybridize with your essence and live closer to the drama of linear time. To be honest, you could say that I am that type, but hopefully not in a parasitic way. I have a friend I knew when I was alive, and he invited me to share his life, and it lifts me out of the Lower Astral when I do.

“The time curse is more like a dark backdrop, but if I ceased striving toward something meaningful, the cursed deadness of lower-astral time would envelop me. The living have their own version of this. If they aren’t striving toward meaning, the dread ticking of the clock haunts them, and lower-astral time seeps in at the edges. When the dread clock strikes the living dead, they sink to the Lower Astral.

“On the other hand, with my skin out of the game, I have access to an additional dimension of time and can navigate it in ways that only the most intuitively gifted humans can.

“You and Max have a very bright time glow, the glow of the super-alive undergoing dramatic change. The two of you are an intense, energetic combo that draws the attention of energy-feeding creatures like moths to a flame. Tommy, you’ve got to be especially careful because you, far more than Max, glow so brightly with an essence that ravenous beings from my realm hunger for. We call it Laepur.

“People in your world can also sense your glow—I’m sure you’ve picked up on it—and some of them are highly dangerous. Max found you by your glow and hungers for it, but I don’t think he means you harm. Mutants sense and need other mutants. He’s really confused about his attraction to you. He needs your energy, but it’s triggering a metamorphosis that terrifies him. Just keep being gentle with him.

“Anyway, like I was saying, there are many types of parasitic visitors. Different cultures named them pretas, hungry ghosts, incubi, and succubae. Some are relatively chill—they content themselves with watching and cause little trouble. Most are just rogue solo operators, but they can do heavy damage to vulnerable people.

“And then there are parasitic automatons controlled by a hive queen called Viealetta. She is an archparasite—a complex entity that sits atop the planetary food chain. She directs these automatons like forager bees sent to gather the nectar of Laepur. She can also take dark people and hollow them out and turn them into her puppets.

“I know, this is creepy, heady stuff, Tommy, so I’m sorry to lay so much dark weirdness on you, but you need to know. I’ve had many experiences of mind parasites, and what we call The Ravenous—ferocious swarms of hungry ghosts, but Viealetta—what I know about her is not something I know firsthand. I learned it from others I trust, mostly The Guild, and I take learning much more seriously now than I did when my skin was in the game.

“Viealetta is extremely powerful, like a demigod. She can operate through multiple beings simultaneously, so her form is, as they say, legion. I call her she, because The Guild has mostly seen her in her hive queen aspect, but she’s a shapeshifter and her real gender is more complex and alien than male or female. She can reach across space and time and into other dimensions. The whole web of human psyches is visible to her, and she can penetrate and manipulate both individual and collective consciousness.”

“What is she trying to manipulate us to do?” I ask.

“I’ve been told that Viealetta has a complex agenda. She feeds on the darker range of emotion and sexual energy, and manipulates the living to create conflict, but only to a point. She needs humanity to survive so she doesn’t lose her host and harvest. But she is not simply a feeder—she needs humans to complete their lifecycle so she can advance her own. She’s even stepped in to stop extinction-level events. Viealetta is cruel and voracious, but she also sometimes defends her human flock, in the way a cattle rancher will act to protect the herd.

“Though her corrupting influence has made people more destructive, she has also assisted evolutionary developments to keep her flock viable.

“The Guild believes she will continue to do so to preserve her host species and her place at the top of the food chain. But she is not all-powerful or all-knowing, so she can make mistakes that undermine her own interests. There is at least one timeline where her influence led to an extinction that left her in a famished and desperate state.

“Viealetta acts in ways that attempt to further her lifecycle, but her means and ultimate ends are not fully understood by us. And it’s possible she doesn’t fully understand them herself. She too is a metamorphic creature.”

“I had an encounter with an evil, spider-like creature,” I say. “It revealed itself to me, almost like it was on purpose. I wonder if it was Viealetta.”

I tell Alex about the transparent spider creature I saw looming above me in town.

“I wasn’t there—I only know what I pick up from your memories, but I’m sure that was her,” says Alex. “Viealetta is very spider-like and the shape of her head is exactly like what you saw. She spins her web around humans, but sometimes she gets tangled in her own web, which is itself entangled in an infinitely larger web that no one, including her, understands.

“I think you and Max are an evolutionary experiment that may help prevent extinction in some way. My hunch is that Viealetta recognizes this and used one of her puppets to destroy your community to bring the two of you closer while creating shock to further your metamorphosis.”

I’m too shocked to speak, and Alex senses this and quietly waits.

“Oh my God,” I say, “you think she destroyed my community . . . to create metamorphosis in me and Max?”

“Tommy. I’m sorry. But yes, I think she was the one who chose to destroy your community, with some kind of purpose like that in mind. She wanted you to experience a level of trauma that helped trigger metamorphosis in your other version.”

Alex pauses as I struggle to accept this terrible truth, giving me space to absorb the shock.

“Likely, Viealetta wants your experiment to be a catalyst for human evolution. Her horrific means do not justify any end, but parasites play a key role in evolution.

“Although Viealetta acts to blind and deform humanity, she also needs the species to evolve to prevent extinction and to further her lifecycle. Like us, she seems caught in certain irresolvable paradoxes, and as powerful as she is, she’s not in control of the total process. Like all life forms, she is caught up in that infinitely complex web of life beyond her comprehension, and she may be intelligent enough to realize that. But she misses very little. She recognizes the momentum of her host species toward extinction, and though she created much of that momentum, she sometimes acts to cultivate certain metamorphic individuals who might disrupt this fatal trajectory.

“There is a color spectrum of human energies. Parasites cannot feed on higher states of human consciousness that are in a blue range toxic to them. Just like many biological parasites need red blood, etheric parasites need the red range of darker emotions like suffering, fear, greed, and lust. That’s why most parasites can’t mess with you, even though you attract them, because you’re throwing out a crazy amount of high colors. And when you and Max are together—there’s a whole outer fringe of ultraviolet in your combined field they can’t get close to.

“Viealetta, like the lesser parasites, needs the red part of the spectrum to feed on. At the same time, she realizes that extinguishing humanity’s higher consciousness would render her host species nonviable.

“Viealetta is trapped in a feeding paradox because she cannot let the species as a whole evolve toward more advanced consciousness without losing her food supply, but she also can’t thwart it entirely without sabotaging her own lifecycle. She seems to allow higher consciousness to develop in a small number of humans while provoking devolutionary trends in the majority.”

“Devolutionary—like making people worse?” I ask.

“Yep. Fragmenting their attention and wrecking their ability to have healthy relationships and communities. Addictions and poor diet also make people easier to feed on.

“That’s horrible. My community wasn’t like that, so maybe that’s why she wanted to destroy it,” I say. But once the words leave my mouth, they feel hollow and false. I don’t want it to be because of me.

“Anything’s possible, but I think we both sense it’s because she has plans for you and Max.”

“Well, I don’t want to be part of her plans—she killed everyone I love!”

Alex doesn’t reply to my outburst. The silence stretches, and I slowly realize why. It’s just a personal reaction, and I have to be willing to work with the dark weirdness—I can’t just rebel against it. Like Alex said, it just is, and how I feel about it doesn’t matter. I collect myself before I speak.

“I was told I’m needed for a mission of some sort. Do you know anything more about the role I’m supposed to play?” I ask.

“It would run against The Guild’s code of conduct to tell you what to do. You’ve got to be guided by your own truth, but you know more than you think you know. Listen, Tommy, I think you’re already playing your role. Your caring actions are what’s keeping your evolutionary experiment together. The only way you can give meaning to the death of those you loved is to keep doing what you’re doing, being the best friend you can be to Max.

“My only suggestion is to take back the statement you made that if more visitors come, you might go out to investigate. In saying that, you issued, in effect, a dangerous magical proclamation. It’s too much of an opening for them. Does that feel true to you?”

“Yes, Alex. Max warned me about that, too. So, I take back what I said. I will not go out to them. If they come to me, I will deal with them as best I can, but I won’t seek them out.”

“Good. You put that very well, Tommy. And now, it feels like my permission to come forward has served its purpose, and I should step back. Be well. You live on the edge of a perilous time, but you have more friends than you know.”

Alex bows his head toward me in a humble gesture of blessing and departure before vanishing into the night.

 

Chapter Eight A Ganzheitlich Relationship Max’s Journal