How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart (Pt. III): "Nice to meet you. What's your paranoid delusion?"
Or at least I'm not Saurian space alien level of crazy
Aaaaand we’re back! Because somehow 69% of you keep reading this (nice) (no seriously it’s been a consistent 69, so thank you).
Nothing new to report on my front right now so I’ll leave you to it. So far, we’ve met Jason Tavares, FinanceBro with a debilitating 9/11 chemtrail obsession, and Monica Lund, a physicist whose family life is in shambles because of her compulsive belief that she’s a Targeted Individual for mass-scale government PsyOps programs. Totally relatable, right?
Now let’s get to the meeting! (Content warning for antisemitic cops I guess but also these are a bunch of conspiracy theorists, of course one of them has to be a bigot.)
Chapter 3
A chorus of welcoming voices echoed through the basement to the chapel of the First Temple of Our Blessed Lady of Elrond Hubble with the deadened resonance of an old tin can:
"Hi, Monica."
Their words splintered off the walls like the lo-fi soundwaves of a long-forgotten analog tape transfer, making Jason's head spin as they dissipated into the vast white nothingness of the room. Jason still felt like he was floating in a vacuum, even though he was standing, leaning against the doorway -- close enough to something real that at least he could escape, if things got too weird.
There were more walls than people in the room, and about four times as many folding chairs in the room as that. A few sparse printouts of children's p@intings randomly decorated two of the walls, which were otherwise barren but for their white silicone coatings. In a way, the emptiness of the audience was the only thing that gave the space any sense of perspective.
"Hi everyone," said the middle-aged woman -- Monica, apparently -- with the ritualistic enthusiasm normally reserved for a cult. She stood and half-smiled, her skeletal fingers dancing ever-so-slightly as she waved to the other guests.
The one across from her was a wide-eyed younger guy with an apple-shaped face. He wore a retrofuturistic glam rock jumpsuit that looked like something David Bowie would have thrown in the trash. He nodded thoughtfully at Monica, squinting to show his attentiveness.
Four seats to his left -- why there was such a gap, Jason wasn't sure -- slinked some mustache'd Southern sitcom reject who looked like he was ripped straight out of the 90s. His eyes were closed, and that ugly caterpillar mustache on his face writhed beneath his nose as his lanky body melted off the chair and onto the floor. He was too young to be falling asleep in public, but too old to be drooling on his bulky red flannel, both of which he was doing at the same time.
A woman with light brown skin and sharp features sat across from this man, between Monica and the Ziggy Stardust-wannabe. She sat with her hands thrust into the pockets of her dress, in a posture that was at once both observant and relaxed, with a closed notebook balanced on her knee. She wore a pair of oversized glasses with thick black rims that worked in conjunction with her bleach-blonde pixie cut to give her a subtly stunning sense of androgyny.
She wasn't Jason's usual type, but he couldn't take her eyes off her all the same. He shook his head to keep it from getting sucked into that void. The scent of over-re-warmed coffee lingered nearby, but Jason stayed put in the safety of the doorway -- at least there in the threshold there was some place to escape.
Monica swallowed, still standing despite the seizures dancing between her knobby knees. She ran a hand through her dark curly hair, then launched into some meandering story about an epic secret-agent-esque bus ride she took to her job at the supercollider up on Prospect Hill -- the same one, Jason couldn't help but notice, where the Weyland woman wanted to build her brand new luxury condos. This wasn't the only reason that he found it hard to pay attention to her half-finished thoughts and other nervous ticks. Did she know that her job would be moving soon, or closing down entirely? Jason couldn't be sure; and honestly, it was hard to track any sort of clear, coherent through-line in her rambling tangents.
Still, he couldn't shake a sense of empathy for the woman. Sure, the monotony of her compulsive wake-up routine was painfully tedious, and she spared no obsessively uninteresting detail about her uneventful work commute. But hey, at least she was putting herself out there.
Which was good and well until she started to snap. "Of course I'm not sure why Jamie couldn't be there for their own son, or even ask for some help from that whore they've been seeing. What's she do with her time, anyway? Huh?!" Her quiet words contained a delicate fury, like forced air through gritted teeth that were about to break from the pressure of the storm inside. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together and traced an invisible line through the air down her center as she inhaled.
Jason felt his knees tense, begging him to bolt for the door. He didn't want to be trapped in some makeshift asylum with these strangers. But something in Monica's voice -- the quiet frenzy of her loneliness, perhaps, or her embarrassment at her own desire to tell a story, to be heard -- made him curious enough to stay.
Then, when she collected herself, she spoke again. "My point is: I took the bus," she said, in a full defiant voice like a child playing at the role of Roman orator. "All by myself, I did it. PsyOps be damned. I found the schedule, made a plan, and waited for a ride, all so I could be there for my little boy and not be..."
And just like that, she lost it again.
"And not be crippled with crazy, I guess," she tagged on beneath her breath.
"Monica, we don't use the c-word in group," the vinyl-clad anime hipster said, slapping his hands on his thighs for emphasis. The sound they made was strangely flat. He whipped his head back to get his angular red hair out of his eyes. Jason wasn't sure which word the guy was referring to -- "crippled" and "crazy" both made him uncomfortable.
The younger woman in the blue dress interjected: "Let her use it -- let her speak." She scratched at the hairline at the back of her neck, where her bleached boycut faded to its thick brown roots.
The younger man and woman had a brief silent stand-off, a war of words exchanged only in the subtle twitches of their eyes. It wasn't long before RetroFuture Boy relented.
"Right," he said. He leaned forward in his chair, hands clamped in the pits of his knees, then cleared his throat to assert his authority. "And what did that feel like, Monica?"
Monica stared down at the ground, searching for an answer in the soles of her shoes. It was a long enough pause that Jason found himself eager to hear it, too.
"It felt like I was in control," she said when she finally spoke. "Or at least, like they weren't. And that's what counts, right?"
"That's what counts," said the older man with the creepy mustache. He nodded slightly, though his eyes were still closed, and Jason couldn't tell if he was talking in his sleep.
The woman with the boyish hair repeated this affirmation, with a cute crooked smirk in the corner of her mouth: "That's what counts."
"Thanks for sharing that, Monica," said the younger guy. "I'm proud of you."
Monica smiled, big and real this time, all swollen with fulfillment. Then she took her seat again as the younger guy stood. It was clear he was in charge of the group, or facilitating somehow, though Jason couldn't understand why the other three people -- who were all older, and at least slightly normal-er-looking -- had organized themselves around a twenty-something raver with the fashion sense of an eighty-year-old sci-fi cartoon.
Still, he addressed the room with his hands behind his back, being careful to make eye contact with each of the other members as he spoke. "Monica's story is important, because it reminds us all that each day can be a victory itself. You're not here to change the way you see the world, and I'm not here to tell you what's the one right way to think -- because I know the answer to that as well as the rest of you. That's to say, not at all.
"We all have different beliefs, and no one's trying to convince us that whatever conspiracy we see is wrong. Because they can't know for sure, and neither can we. We're here today -- and last week, and every day we're here -- to remember how to engage with the world. To cope with reality, regardless of our theories, and to help each other know how to see what's real and tangible again."
Then he looked at Jason. He squinted, turned his head to the side, and opened his mouth, as if he had just noticed someone else's presence in the room. "Let's take a quick break and reconvene in five," he said.
Jason couldn't tell who the man was talking to. But it seemed like as good a time as any to grab a cup of that awful-smelling coffee. Maybe the caffeine sludge would wake his brain up enough to get the fuck out of there, instead of hanging around this cult of creeps against his better judgment.
The caffeinated sludge was even worse than Jason expected, but he sucked it down as best he could. At the very least, it gave him something to do that kept him from running out the door. Granted, he wasn't quite convinced that staying around was the best course of action, either.
But Mr. Atal said he had to come here in order to keep his job. How else was Jason going to get the help he needed to ... well, not let his compulsive truth-seeking hurt their investment deals, he supposed. If hanging around in a strange and soundless church basement for a couple hours every week would make a difference, then Jason was willing to give it a shot.
Not that he had any faith in the process. The truth was the truth, as far as he was concerned, no matter how many wheels within wheels he would have to unravel. Maybe this could help him cope, even if it never really satisfied that itch to find the bottom of the well.
At least it was better than being alone.
Jason took another sip of caffeinated sludge to steel himself up for some bullshit small talk. But he didn't have to try too hard. Because as soon as he brought the cup down from his lips, he saw the short-haired woman with the glasses walking towards him.
"Come here often?" she said with a smirk.
"What? No, this is literally the -- " Jason turned and motioned at the door, just to make it clear he wasn't one of the regular weirdos there. "I just walked in and I -- "
"Relax. It was a joke." She touched his shoulder gently; even more surprising was that Jason actually felt comforted by the gesture. "'Come here often,' it's like a thing people that say. In movies, or whatever."
"Is it though?"
Jason meant this to sound playful, but it came off harsher than intended. His instinctive defenses tended to get the best of him. After all, it was usually safer to shield yourself than to deal with the disappointment when someone -- like, say, Mr. Atal -- tried to tear down your entire worldview.
The woman averted her doe brown eyes, hiding them behind the thick rims of her glasses. "Maybe people don't really say it, not in real life. I don't know."
In the stillness of the moment that followed, Jason noticed a striking contrast between the woman's dark features and the sterile room. There was something in the sleek lines of her cheekbones, and the blackness of her eyes, that gravity -- attraction -- couldn't escape.
She put one hand in the pocket of her royal blue dress and extended the other. "I'm Kyle."
"Jason." They shook.
"Nice to meet you Jason. What's your paranoid delusion?"
Jason tensed up, panicked goosebumps flashing like a warning sign against his skin. He tried to keep it together. "That's a bold introduction."
"To be fair, you have been hanging in the doorway during an addiction support group meeting for conspiracy theorists." Kyle's thin lips curved upwards as she lithely pulled her hand back from Jason's grip. Then she looked at him with a full-on smile that pulled to the right, revealing an uncorrected snaggle tooth at the edge of her incisors. "It seemed like a safe assumption to make."
She was right, of course; Jason's life had been upended by his paranoid delusions. But he wasn't ready to admit that, any more than he was willing to admit he'd let her jesting get the best of him.
So he just nodded and took another sip of coffee sludge.
"Not that...I don't mean like...we try not to make assumptions here," she added quickly, bouncing into Jason's field of view with widened eyes. "Or judge anyone. Really, at all. We've all got our own weird shit, and that's why we're here."
Jason motioned with his chin towards the space-age hipster, who appeared to be wiring something into his hand. "So is he in charge here, or...?"
"Who, Adam?" said Kyle. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then looked back at Jason with a curious squint. "Why, do you recognize him?"
"Should I?" Jason couldn't help but notice that his questions were being answered with questions.
"I don't know. He used to play in a band." She shrugged and looked at her feet. The slight ease that had settled over him after she had introduced herself had drifted away. There must have been something that she wasn't letting on.
And yet...her ominous aloofness didn't scare him off. If anything, it made him even more intrigued -- by Kyle herself, and by the strange nature of the place in general. Like there was a conspiracy within it all just waiting for him to find the pattern and unravel it.
The thought was enough to make him to stick around for a little while longer.
Kyle perked up again, suddenly eager to continue her little welcome speech. "Anyway, you've already met Monica. She's a sweetheart. And the guy with the mustache is Felix. He can be a little rough around the edges -- he gets these migraines, but -- he's not all bad. He's trying, anyway."
"I see," Jason said, nodding. "It's kind of a weird addiction. Conspiracy theories, I mean. If that's what you want to call them -- I don't know if there's a better name or something. But it's not like a chemical dependency, you know? These people here aren't hooked on heroin or something. Unless of course, they are."
Kyle shook her head, once again revealing the dark roots of her hair. "Narcotics Anonymous meets on Tuesday. But hey, maybe there is some kind of government PsyOps thing beaming radio waves or something else to alter our perceptions."
Kyle said this so nonchalantly, but she also had a point. That Monica woman was a bit off her rocker. What if the problem she was dealing with was actually something like...
"Like chemtrails?" he said.
Kyle brought a hand up to her mouth, trying and failing to stifle a laugh. Once she recovered and moved her hand away, Jason saw the subtle sparkle of a dimple in her right cheek, like the black hole of a smile that drew the darkness towards it.
"Chemtrails! Sure, yeah. That's definitely an option. I guess."
And just like that, the magic in her cheek had disappeared.
Jason squinted. "Are you fucking with me?"
Kyle raised her right hand and pinched her pointer finger to her thumb."Just a little."
And just like that, the dimpled darkness returned.
"I don't mean to make fun," she said, making sure that Jason saw the sincerity in her eyes when she spoke. "I personally don't go in for that chemtrail stuff. But if you do, hey, that's cool. We don't judge. Is that why you're here then?"
"Maybe. No. I don't know." Jason found himself fixing his posture on instinct, as if it was a way to hide the shame that he'd exposed. His weird, embarrassing secret -- so weird it was even scorned among the psycho strangers in that white room.
Except the crooked curve of Kyle's mouth was not a judging smirk. It was teasing, but not in the way the men at work would tease him over his obsession. She just accepted it, brushing it off like it was something as simple as hating cilantro -- some silly genetic quirk, instead of a massive global conspiracy.
The dimple in her cheek deepened. "Let's get you another shitty cup of coffee then, and settle in for the show," she said.
Meeting Transcript: 030930 [Excerpt]
AO: Welcome -- Jason, was it?
JT: Jason, yeah. Hi.
AO: Is there something you wanted to say before we begin?
JT: No. I'm just -- here to listen.
AO: Well then you're in for a treat. Felix, you had something you wanted to talk about?
FB: I did, yeah. I ain't really been a social guy at the station since coming back off leave, you understand. But then the other day there was a ... Sgt. Pluck was celebrating ... I ain't really sure what he was celebrating, come to think of it. But there was a barbecue, and all the families were invited, so of course I got the memo. The other guys though, they didn't realize I'd got the memo. 'Least I don't think they did. But word gets around, you know. So one of the newer guys, Officer Cohn -- he's one of them Jew-cops -- and he's got this little adopted Asian Jew-baby. Kid came over to me, all cute and innocent-like. 'Hey Mister!' he said. 'Seen any Lizards? My friend had a gecko but he said it got lost.' Then he glanced back at his dad and --
[Note: subject paused, composing self]
And I saw them older guys there all laughing like it was the funniest fucking thing they'd heard in years.
ML: Oh dear, how awful!
AO: Is there a way you can, I don't know, speak to someone about harassment? Human relations, or a staff psychologist, or...?
FB: [Note: subject shook his head, indicated a negative response] You don't show that kinda weakness at the station. Not if you wanna survive. Not unless you want desk duty for the rest of your life.
AO: And you don't want that.
FB: Hell no! I didn't join the force to push paper around!
JT: Wait, can you backup and explain the Jewish thing, with the gecko? What's the connection there?
[Note: FB has concerns about a possible infiltration -- ]
FB: Saurians. Some people call 'em Reptilians, but they're technically Saurians from the planet Alpha Centauri.
[Note: That.]
AO: There was an incident --
FB: The frustrating part about it is, there ain't a lot of Jew-cops to begin with, right? So this kid, the one who comes up to me about the lizards -- his dad is also a Jew-cop. He transferred in from another town, but he wasn't there when the rest of them all found out about the Saurians. But someone told the new guy -- who's also a Jew -- and he told his kid, who's also a Jew. You see where I'm going with this?
JT: Um. I think so. I just really hope I'm wrong.
FB: Look, it's the same as the banks and the media. What do they all got in common?
JT: Money?
FB: Jews. And now they're in the cops, too? But not 'til after I had found them out? Or after the rest of the force found out that I had...
[Note: subject paused, bearing physical symptoms indicative of idiopathic intracranial hypertension (follow up)]
Point is, that's suspicious, right?
JT: I just need to make sure I'm on the right page here. Are you saying that the Jews are also Saurians -- is that the right word? Okay, so Jews are all these lizard alien people, and they run the world for -- I assume -- some insidious purpose, and now they're in the police, too? This is really what you're saying?
[Non-verbal confirmation from FB]
JT: Am I hearing this right? Are you all hearing this too?
FB: They all know the story.
JT: Yeah that's a 'story' all right. I can go in for PsyOps and the New World Order and all that good stuff. And okay I know plenty of Jewish people in my line of work. But I promise they are not extra-terrestrial dinosaurs. That is fucking crazy talk.
[Note: We try not to use the 'c-word' here.]
FB: Your 'line of work,' huh? That mean you're one of 'em?
JT: Which one, a Jew, or a gecko? 'Cause I'm pretty sure neither. Well my mom -- not that -- obviously it's fine if --
FB: So how do you know they ain't brainwashed you already?
The crazy racist cop had a point.
Shit.
What if Jason had it wrong this entire time? What if that's what the chemtrails were about? The weird white room engulfed him as panicked thoughts swirled through the vacuum, hollow as a ping-pong ball. How could he have overlooked that possibility? After all the tapes and simulations he'd watched again and again and again and again -- how had it never occurred to him that some other force, an extraterrestrial force, could have been behind it all? Every obscure motivation, every missing money trail and each construction oversight of controlled demolitions that investigators all had swept beneath the rug -- what if it wasn't the New World Order?
Or worse yet: what if it was, and Jason couldn't fathom the true depths of their darkest agenda?
Jason felt his eyelids peeling back, the foaming white tide washing over the truth before his eyes, like some kind of existential alien technology correcting his broken vision, and then --
Then he realized that everyone was watching this crisis of faith as it all unfolded his mind. And Jason had nowhere to hide.
So he did what he always did: he swelled up his chest, straightened his shirt, swept a hand through his black hair and scoffed.
"Really?" he said, perhaps too forcefully, giving the appearance he was keeping it together. "The rest of you put up with this sci-fi Nazi bullshit?"
That was enough to get a rise out of Adam. He stood up abruptly, his folding chair screeching against the floor as it pushed backwards. "You're gonna have to walk it back, man," he said, stepping up into Jason's face.
At first it seemed aggressive, but Jason was surprised when he followed it up with a gut-punch of compassion: "We're not here to criticize anyone's beliefs or view of the world. We're just trying to provide coping mechanisms."
There was comfort in Adam's words. But not enough to balance out the stress from Jason's own loss of control.
"Maybe this guy needs a better 'coping mechanism' than being a fucking Antisemite 'cause of lizard people."
"Saurians." The sharpness in Kyle's shrill voice resonated with the walls of the room. Her words continued, slow and forceful around the plosives, just to make it clear: "Felix asked us to call them Saurians and it's important that we respect his -- "
"No. No way. This is ridiculous," Jason said, flailing, as if his arms could wave away the fog of words. "I thought I'd give this a shot, like maybe I could learn something. But this is some legitimately insane-o otherworldly bullshit. And whatever weird shit I do or say or am, I assure you: I am not fucking crazy."
The group stared back at Jason with the blank apathy of over-attention. So he cleared his throat for clarity: "Or at least I'm not Saurian space alien level of crazy."
There was silence, then the salivated crackle of Monica's disappointed motherhood. "So what's your conspiracy, hun?" she said, her voice dripping with a sickly, stinging sweetness. "You don't have to tell us right now, of course. The first time can be scary, I know. But you came here for a reason. Just like Felix. Just like me. And whatever you believe could sound just as crazy to someone else."
"No one is required to share," Kyle added, trying to play the mediator. "This is a safe space -- "
Jason spat back. "A safe space for delusional bigots, maybe."
"That's it." A booming depth had overtaken Adam's voice. In another room, it would have been thunderous. But here, the sound-absorbent walls soaked in the resonance, amplifying the absence left behind. He held his shaking arm out as straight as he could and pointed one steady mechanical finger at the door. It was the first time Jason noticed that his hand was a prosthetic. "Get out."
Jason's father had always taught him that a real man stands his ground. And whatever newfangled 3D-printed graphene polycarbonite was underneath that strange white silicone surface that he stood upon, it was still technically a "ground" of some sort, anyway. As much as he wanted to leave, he didn't want to concede the power -- the satisfaction -- of letting these freaks push him around.
Unfortunately, he wasn't really prepared for any sort of clever comeback, either. So he just sneered and said, "That's fine. I didn't want to be a part of your psychopath support group anyway."
It wasn't his best moment.
So he decided to punctuate his words with actions, shoving his way through the rows and rows of folding chairs, throwing them aside to carve a path back to the door. He was slightly disappointed by the subtle thuds they made as they splintered off and hit the soundproofed floor; he'd been hoping for more of a dramatic clang! But at that point, there was nothing else to do -- no deal to renege, no bargain to drive, barely an ego left to appease -- so Jason just kept on walking.
When he reached the door, he shouted back over his shoulder: "I'm not fucking crazy."
Except he wasn't talking to the people in the room.
That irony wasn't lost on him either.