The loop, p.1
The Loop, page 1
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To the ones who didn’t make it through
And to the ones who acted with wisdom and kindness despite it all
No man is free who cannot control himself.
—Pythagoras of Samos
* * *
Paint “No Rules” on the water tower.
—Aesop Rock
Transcript Excerpt, Nightwatchman Podcast Episode 251, Uploaded 6/1/21, 03:47 a.m.:
Welcome to another broadcast for the thinkers, drinkers, freaks, geeks, smokers, jokers, fornicators, freedom fighters, and other fuckups who populate these early hours. As always, you’re listening to the Nightwatchman, the only man brave enough to tell you the truth, the one media source you can depend on, throwing you the life preserver of legitimate facts in this ever-stormier sea of lies we call the big ol’ US of A.
Now I know our listeners are chompin’ at the bit for some follow-up on the Adam Colson case and what Brazil’s sudden willingness to play ball and extradite a dual citizen means for the other war criminals currently sipping caipirinhas on the sandy beaches of Ipanema. And we’ll get to that. I promise. But first there are a couple of particularly questionable items in the news that we want to shine a light on tonight with the return of a little feature we call the Yeah Right Roundup.
First, we’ve got the discovery of a new, even-more-insidious security-breaching “back door” on your phone, thanks to the undeletable MoonLite trashware app installed on most every device regardless of manufacturer. Now, I know regular listeners would never walk around with an off-the-shelf version of Stalin’s Dream in their pocket, but maybe you’re a newer listener who thinks these back doors aren’t being exploited by the government and/or corporations in tandem. Maybe you think, They’d never track me. They’d never listen to me. And to that I say…
Yeah, right.
If you want a way to close these back doors, or find hardware that’s built for clean, encrypted communications, stay tuned through the end of the show and we’ll have some solid, NW-endorsed products to tell you about.
Next up we’ve got grimmer fare: a murder-suicide that seems ’bout as fishy as a deep-sea trawler. Open your ears for me and listen to this article from Turner Falls’ local paper, the Observer, and tell me if any of this makes a lick of sense to you.
“Mother, Son Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide
“Turner Falls, OR—Police are investigating a possible murder-suicide that left a young man and his mother dead.
“Officers found the pair just before eight a.m. Saturday in the 1700 block of Kensington Avenue.
“Police said they received a 911 call from a concerned neighbor who heard a struggle and checked in on the family only to discover the bodies of the deceased. First responders pronounced both the mother and son dead at the scene.
“ ‘This is an incredibly difficult situation for everybody involved,’ said Sergeant Bill Remar, Turner Falls PD.
“Police are investigating the case as a murder-suicide. Remar would not describe any injuries or possible cause of death, or release the names of the deceased citing the pending notification of next of kin and the ongoing nature of the investigation.
“The Turner Falls School District has confirmed the youngest victim attended Summit Ridge High School. The district released a statement saying it was heartbroken to learn of the passing of one of its students.
“The extended family of the deceased were contacted but gave no response.
“Update: The sheriff’s office said Saturday that the victims are seventeen-year-old Brady Miller and forty-two-year-old Julie Miller, both of Turner Falls. They are survived by estranged father and husband Samuel Miller, a development lead for local medical supply manufacturer IMTECH. He is not considered a subject of interest in the investigation and could not be reached for comment.
“Update/exclusive: The Observer has obtained a statement from Constance Logue, the neighbor who discovered the deceased. Logue said, ‘I heard yelling, and a car door slamming. Then the Millers’ dog wouldn’t stop barking, which isn’t something we’ve ever had a problem with. We’re friendly, so I walked over to check, and when I noticed the front door was cracked open I knocked to let them know I was coming in. I tripped over some luggage in the foyer and noticed that a vase full of flowers in the entryway had been knocked to the floor. Something about that, and the dog… I got goose bumps. You could feel something was wrong. Then I walked around the corner into their living room, and I found Brady and Julie. That poor boy… lying on the couch, a pillow still smashed over his face. And Julie was lying on the floor near him with an empty bottle of her heart pills on the coffee table. I thought about CPR, but I could tell by the way they looked that I couldn’t help them. I ran back to my house and locked the door and called 911. While I was waiting for them I couldn’t stop thinking that this didn’t make any sense. Julie loved that boy. So did Sam. Even when they were splitting up, he was their little angel, you could tell. I can’t picture either of them hurting a hair on his head, and I… They only ever wanted the best for him. It’s senseless. It just breaks my heart.’ ”
So that’s where it stands right now, listener. Obviously it’s sad, and it’s tragic, and at first glance maybe that’s all it is. You can imagine a mom at wits’ end, under some insurmountable pressure—maybe a husband who’s about to take full custody—doing something like that. Because it happens. It does. People break.
But… BUT… longtime listeners know that we’ve had our eyes and ears on Turner Falls for a while now, ever since half the companies in Big Data simultaneously decided to build their largest-ever centers on the edges of the quaint little tourist-trap ski town. You can go all the way back to episode two thirty-five and give it a listen again for the full details… There was no specialized workforce, no environmental benefits… but all of a sudden the world’s billionaires can’t get enough of that high desert real estate. It. Doesn’t. Track. AND the Nightwatchman’s crack research staff are taking a look at some other business, shall we say, quirks, in the area, and that includes this Samuel Miller’s company, IMTECH. There’s definitely something else going on, and we’re peering as hard and deep as we can into that darkness to see the whole picture. So listen—you’ve got to be patient with us before we can report on that, because we like to rely on a little something the dying breed known as journalists used to call FACTS.
But, folks, even without all that, even if there were no other reason to give Turner Falls the old suspicious side eye, there are still enough things in this article to get your antennae up, aren’t there?
We’ve got an estranged husband who is somehow NOT a person of interest in the kind of case where the husband is always the first person of interest. What does the Turner Falls PD know about this man that we don’t? We’ve got a neighbor reporting signs of a struggle and the sound of a car door slamming, which could be a third party fleeing the scene. We’ve got luggage packed at the entry to the house. Now let me ask you, who packs up for a trip just before killing their child and themselves? On top of that we’ve got a forty-two-year-old woman overwhelming and suffocating a healthy seventeen-year-old male, who the neighbor describes as positioned on a couch like he was napping and not fighting for his life. And then we’ve got an overdose by heart medication, which, you know, we’ve researched, and that’s not something people do. You go mixing nitrate drugs with something like Viagra, then sure, you could vasodilate yourself to death, but killing yourself with heart pills alone… wildly unlikely and uncommon. Now, we know that the murderers in murder-suicides have a tendency to leave the room where they’ve just killed, especially in family cases. The thinking is that the remorse pushes them away and drives their suicide. Most common place to find the murderer is the backyard, separate from what they’ve done. But here they find mom laid out next to her son…
You want to write it all off to madness, mental illness. Something. But when you’ve got this many questionable facts being reported, and a possible perpetrator who’s been cleared with almost unnecessary expediency, you start to wonder… And I can tell you from years of shining the light that there’s a pattern to this sort of senseless thing: you watch where these multinational corporations land and operate, and you watch for these kinds of deaths that simply do not feel right, and, pardon my French, but they go hand in fucking hand. You run out of pushpins mapping these things.
So when I look at this incident and the companies flooding into the area I start to wonder about Turner Falls: Is this just the case of a fractured mind committing an inexplicable tragedy? Or is it the beginning of something worse? Do I need to get my pushpins ready for whatever is next?
Folks, I know I’m sounding a little ghoulish here, but after a while you feel like you’ve seen too much. Learned too much. Honestly… it does make you a little crazy, and you don’t want to be right about the worst things, and it hurts when you are. So I want to believe this is an anomaly. I want to believe that these massive companies have the people’s best interests in mind. Maybe they’ll create a beautiful symbiotic relationship and jobs and money will rain down like mana and our corporate benefactors will usher in a new golden age of peace and prosperity.
It sounds nice, doesn’t it, folks? But I can picture you out there, shaking your heads as you listen, and I know what you’re thinking…
Yeah, right.
PART ONE VECTOR/INSERTION
chapter one A REPORTABLE INCIDENT
Lucy wrote “Fucking animals!” on a piece of notebook paper, and around those words she drew arrows pointing in every direction.
She wanted to rip the page from her binder and slide it to Bucket, but he was stuck two rows over, separated from her ever since Mr. Chambers caught them giggling at the absurd photoshopped pics on Bucket’s phone.
Lucy missed sitting next to Bucket, and more with each passing week. He was the only other brown kid in class—hell, one of only four at the whole school—and it was calming when he was with her. She didn’t feel so… examined. Bucket would never dare to touch her hair, or say he was “jealous of her tan,” or worse yet, call her “exotic” and make her feel like a creature at the goddamn zoo.
But now he was across the room, face buried in his textbook, and she was alone, and she wished she’d never laughed at that picture of Wilford Brimley riding a manatee into an old-timey western sunset, yelling something about “diabeetus.” If there was a dumber way to lose access to her best friend, she couldn’t think of it.
Honestly, they could have been in worse trouble with the phone event. If Mr. Chambers had swiped deeper into Bucket’s image files instead of turning the phone off and placing it on his desk, then he might have found the dozens of pictures where Bucket had pasted shots of himself into screencaps from lesbian porn: in some he gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up; in others he sipped on a cup of tea, pinkie out, or casually sat between two women who were about to, according to the film, “try kissing a little, just to see what it’s like.”
Bucket claimed his obsession with the videos came from his “model girlfriend back in Cali who totally went both ways,” but Lucy had her doubts. Still, she wanted to understand Bucket’s fascination. She even tried watching a clip from his favorite site—notjustroommates.com—but found the footage did little for her. She spent the day in a funk after that, hoping some switch would flip in her head and allow her to like girls. Seemed like that would be easier, somehow, especially once she went to college and left the uppity bitches at Spring Meadow High far, far behind.
But no—it was still Nate Carver’s big hands and wide back and perfect smile she thought of when she rubbed against her pillow at night. Even worse, Nate was one of them: he lived on Brower Butte in a house so big it gave her vertigo if she looked up to its peak, and like most of the other rich kids in town his parents were both employed at St. Andrews—the hospital and IMTECH were the only two places in Turner Falls for making serious money, at least until the data centers opened. That hospital money meant Nate got a brand-new car for his sixteenth birthday. When he posted up on the basketball court, he wore custom shoes, which he bragged had to be insured before they could even ship. His brother was at Harvard, and Nate claimed he was headed there himself. Said his grandpa’s name was on a plaque at the library. “I’m a slam dunk.”
Lucy knew at least twenty kids smarter than Nate, but none came from money, and zero percent of them would ever feel comfortable describing themselves as “a slam dunk.” So when Lucy thought about Nate, she wished for two very different things at the same time: his beautiful body on top of hers, and his beautiful body utterly destroyed in a fiery accident involving his fancy new car and a telephone pole.
Lucy tried to focus on Mr. Chambers at the front of the room, but the dull hum of something about partial derivatives was interrupted when Ben Brumke unleashed a bone-rattler of a belch and the kids around him in the back corner moaned and raised their sleeves to their faces, anticipating the gut-rot stink of Ben’s homemade protein shakes. Bucket, who often made the mistake of expressing his feelings aloud, said, “Brumke’s eating roadkill again,” and a few in the class laughed. But then Ben threw his pen at Bucket and said, “Shut your face, Sandy,” and Mr. Chambers cleared his throat in a way that let everyone know they needed to calm down or face a lecture.
Half the kids at school called Bucket “Sandy,” ever since they found out he came to the States from Pakistan, and all the kids knew what was really being said. Lucy got her share of nasty bullshit too—plenty of “Loogie” and “Go back to Mexico” and “taco bitch” and “donkey fucker,” and after a while she didn’t even care enough to tell them she was actually from Peru. She didn’t feel like they deserved to know any true things about her, and she could imagine all the Paddington jokes at her expense. More than that, she didn’t want them being able to research why she had been adopted by the Hendersons in the first place. Lucy Henderson had it bad enough—god only knew how they’d treat Lucia Alvarez, especially if they knew what her birth parents had done…
Lucy looked back at Bucket, the way he was holding in his anger. Their sophomore year had been so bad that they both ended up needing bite guards at night to save their teeth from grinding. Bucket’s jaw was clenched now, his hands white-knuckled around the edges of his desk. Bucket made eye contact with her and Lucy did her best to send a message with her face.
This is temporary. One more year, and we both leave this podunk hillbilly bullshit town forever.
Turner Falls, Oregon, in the rearview mirror. Middle fingers up as we drive.
We leave these fucking animals behind.
Bucket took a breath. He released his death grip on the desktop.
Mr. Chambers sensed the tension and turned toward the class. “I know it can be tough to focus this close to the end of the school year, but we’ve got one more chapter to cover before the final on Thursday, and then we’re done for the year. Can we keep the insults to a minimum, Mr. Brumke?”
“Sure.”
“And Mr. Marwani?”
“Ben’s the one who’s belching right in—”
“Mr. Marwani?”
Bucket huffed. “Sure.”
The class fell into a lull then. The too-brief excitement had drifted to nothing, and Mr. Chambers’s monotone continued to recite the magic terms all the students would need to memorize before their next shot at the SAT’s, and the school’s meager, outdated cooling system did what it could to battle the desert heat, which transformed their big beige brick of a school into a low-key oven. For a moment the room drifted into a kind of soporific peace.
It was so surprisingly calm that it took a few minutes before anyone in the room even noticed the way that Chris Carmichael was twitching at his desk.
* * *
Jake Bernhardt sat right behind Chris, a few desks back from the front of the room.
Chris’s family lived way out in Cascade Woods, a ramshackle assemblage of manufactured homes and trailers notorious for their meth lab explosions. You did your best to not take a wrong turn in Cascade Woods, lest you end up with some ganked-out tweeker shotgunning your ass with rock salt (or worse—rumors said there were bodies buried in the deep boonies).
Jake’s family hailed from Brower Butte, and their property was so sprawling that they’d devoted a huge chunk of their backyard to an elaborate racetrack for Jake’s remote control cars. At Jake’s house, you did your best to jump from the roof outside Jake’s window to precisely the right deep spot in the pool, lest you end up with a busted ankle like the one that cost Bradley England his senior football season.
