Tellus, A Story (5) Ken left the store feeling mortified. He felt it was his curse to be over sensitive, he never wanted to go out in public again. He felt sick, what else could go wrong today? When he finally got home he shut the front door on his grueling day and made his usual inexpensive broccoli noodle soup and cheese toast and listened to some favorite music. The music made him feel like his soul had some life in it. Something inside of him responded to music, he did not know why but it kept him company. He could feel the musical movements in the fiber of his being. He felt music had saved his life several times, it had given him reason to live. Tunes sometimes filled him with joy and sometimes made him feel empty. Music moved him and when it ended he felt like something was missing. Even though he was home he still felt uneasy. Something was wrong, he just knew it but he could not put his finger on it. ‘Maybe I ought to have the car looked at,’ he thought. There were a lot of things he would do if he could afford it. He would sleep on it and decide in the morning, there was nothing he could do about the car at the moment anyway. He decided to finish his dinner and watch some TV and waste his evening as he always did. He felt bad about not making better use of his time but what could he do? He was losing his life to the daily grind. Maybe they were right about him being retarded. He had been rejected by every aspect of life so often that he did not feel like trying anymore. The phone rang and it startled him. ‘God I hate phones, I don’t want to answer it,’ he thought. Disregarding his bad feeling hi picked up the phone anyway, and more or less automatically said, “Hello?” “Hello, Ken?” It was Dave’s wife, her voice was slow and flat, she sounded depressed. “Hi Janie.” “You... your brother’s dead.” He paused and realized that was why she sounded depressed. “Oh,” he said. “Dave’s dead? Are you sure?” He could not believe it, it could not be real, he was just talking to him earlier but he knew she was telling the truth. “Yes.” “How?” “They say he was shot, assassinated by some revolutionary group, you know how he was always getting involved in these things in his job, I don’t know.” “How did you find this out?” “Some people called and told me, the police did. I don’t know, some thing is not right about this. He warned me that this might happen one day...” She sounded to ken like the more she talked the more she was getting upset. “That what might happen?” he prodded gently when he felt she had calmed down a little. “They got him, he transgressed some law of theirs, it’s like a game to them.” “You mean the people he worked for?” “Please, I can’t talk about it anymore. I just wanted to tell you he was gone before you saw it on TV or read about it in the paper.” “I understand, thanks for calling.” She hung up immediately. The questions in his mind swirled around but they seemed to add up to a government that condoned murder. The image of himself and Dave playing together as little boys came to his mind and he cried. Chapter Four That Tuesday morning Ken read in the newspaper that Dave had been murdered by a member of the Symbolic Army. The paper went on about how the murder had walked up to the ‘State Intelligence Team agent as if in a trance’, had fired all the bullets into the body and continued to pull the trigger even after the gun was empty and then walked off as if nothing had happened. The few people who saw it were so shocked that they did nothing, it seemed unreal they claimed. The killer had calmly walked around a corner and was not seen again. The police called his disappearance a mystery. Later a tape had been delivered to a TV station. On it a voice claimed that the Symbolic Army had struck a blow against a member of an oppressive government agency and would continue their actions until the whole country rose up in a revolt against the government. None of this made much sense to Ken. What had Dave ever done to deserve this? He had nothing to do with this group. It only made sense to Ken if it was a purposeful set up, but what could Dave have done to deserve the death penalty? He had talked about certain airplane crashes that appeared to have been arranged by the government. He had talked about political dirty tricks and how certain secret government agencies were completely partisan to the Crats and worked against the Pubs, including the State Intelligence Team, but he had never gone public with any of this stuff. Dave had always been a company man. It was difficult for Ken to make phone calls under normal circumstance, sometimes he felt that he must have a phobia about phones. Calling work was never easy but he felt he had to do it. He told his supervisor that he would not be in that day due to ‘a death in the family’. After they wheedled enough details out of him to satisfy their curiosity, the management told him to take the week off and said he could fill out the form for his leave time when he returned to work. He was grateful for the break, because even though he felt drained, he would never have requested a week off. The next calls would be even more difficult than most. He started with the New York phone numbers because the news program she was on originated there. He was not sure why he was doing this but somehow it was the only thing that made sense to him. It might not work at all but he had no other planes and he felt he had to do something. It was always hard for him to decide because he never knew all the facts so he did not know what would come from his actions. The events of his life and those in the world seemed to him to happen at random. The TV station rebuffed him and said they would not give out phone numbers for reporters so he called the Los Angeles station because she lived there. He had no luck again so he started looking up mutual friends he and Tracey had once shared. It was very difficult for him but he was not doing this for himself, he was doing it for his brother. At one time, when they were children, Ken had been Tracey’s mentor. He had done a lot of reading in grade school as he had very little of a social life even then and she had been impressed by his intellectuality when he was in high school. She soon caught up with his abilities and learned that very little of what he knew was practical. She passed him by and left him behind after his brother got involved. Dave was older, more secure and always smarter. When they were younger Dave would, sometimes for fun, con Ken out of his allowance. Ken had been gullible enough as a child to be talked into almost anything. After Ken introduced Dave to Tracey they got involved, much to Ken’s dismay. Dave always took his girlfriends, Ken had to quit letting Dave meet the few girls he knew. While in junior college Tracey had talked to a recruiter from a back east media organization. She was hired and eventually went into TV as a reporter, making more money than her father ever had in just her first year. She had done well for herself while Ken had languished and seemed to progress no further. His friends all found their niches in life but he seemed to have no destiny, ability or luck. She was nurtured and he was stifled. Dave went into the military and had penetrated far into the secret military administration through his contacts. Ken had refused to serve in the military and appealed his mandatory service as a pacifist. All of that had been so long ago it was like it had happened in a different world. He became more aggressive with his phone calls. Ken had not talked to Tracey since high school, he was expecting this to be a demeaning experience and most likely not fruitful. After some long phone research he managed to connect with her at the southern California television affiliate. “Hi, this is me Ken,” he said across the distance, trying to keep his voice neutral, not knowing how he was going to be received. “Ken? From the film department?” she asked with a smile in her voice. “Ken from Murphy High School, remember me? We used to talk sometimes.” “Oh yes, how the mighty have fallen,” her voice had turned into an icy frown. “I found you embarrassing then and I find you embarrassing me now, how did you get this number? I am very busy.” “Claudine Maple gave it to me after I explained how important it was that I...” “Who?” “An old friend of yours, lives in the city.” “Oh Claudine.” “I take it you’ve heard about Dave’s death?” “Oh, yes. I am sorry, I should not have been so flippant but you surprised me. I was not expecting this, it’s been a long time since we knew each other. Can you forgive me?” “His murder is being lied about. They say he was killed by the Symbolic Army but it was the government that murdered him.” “Do you have proof of this?” “No, I just know it.” “Why don’t you believe the Symbolic Army did it on their own?” “Something is not right, he never told me he was working on that case. Why would they kill him, how did they even know who he was?” “How would you know if it was a secret? Dave and I used to go out together, did you know that?” He could tell by her voice that it was so long ago for her that it meant little to her now. It had meant so much to him in his life. “Yes, I knew that,” he answered patiently. “What do you want? I mean, excuse me, but why did you call?” “II was trying to get any possible information about Dave that you might have seen which was not released to the public. I thought maybe you might know something about this being part of a conspiracy.” “I can understand that you are distraught,” she said sympathetically, “but there is little that I can do. This is just one story out of many and I am not involved in it professionally. You would do better by calling the local police, television station or newspaper.” “I understand,” his voice sounded disappointed and hopeless and that upset him. “Look, give me your number and I will call you back if I happen to come across anything that you might be interested in, ok?” “Ok,” he answered, knowing it was a ploy to try and make him feel better. He gave her his number anyway in case she actually did find out something. Bill Wright watched the local noon news to see if he was on it. The interview with the television news crew had not gone well that morning. His story was the third one on, after the recent murder and the house fire. It lead off with the news reader saying, “Well that wacky cult led by Bill Wright is up to some new tricks now. You may remember the old sex and drugs scandal, unlike those, this one seems to involve Dr. Wright himself.” Then they went into a sound bite of the interview from earlier in the day, the worst part. “You contaminated the grounds with radiation.” The reporter had stated the question in a tone of voice that suggested ‘any real professional would have known better.’ “It was an accident, something unanticipated...” Before he could say that the radioactive sample was too small to do what it did under ordinary circumstances, the reporter interrupted him. “You admit it was poor procedure?” Bill could hear the snap of a trap in the back of his mind. “No, there wasn’t that much to it...” He meant to say there was not much to the radiation sample but it came out sounding like there was not much to his procedure. Before he had a chance to clarify this the reporter asked another question. “You call radioactive contamination, ‘Not much to it’?” Tracey asked this in a strained and incredulous tone of voice that made him feel that she took him for a childish fool, due to her lack of technical understanding, instead of the accredited scientist that he was. “There was not all that much radioactive material to start with. It got out of control because...” “You admit it was out of control!” The reporter pounced triumphantly on this revealed ‘fact’. “You’ve heard it here first!” “It was out of control because the dark energy...” He was going to go on and say how the dark matter that filled the void of the universe had excited the sample unexpectedly under the conditions of the experiment, possibly due to the influence of broadcast electricity and that the sample was in a layered box designed to concentrate energy. “Is that the same stuff that you said you ‘cured’ people with and then got into trouble with the Medical Drug Association?” “That was an authorized medical experiment that is beyond the scope of this interview at the moment.” The sound bite ended, the newsreader came back on. “We will see how the authorities deal with this in the next few days. John, do you have the whether for us?”
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |