From: "the kid"<pepelives@potmail.com>
To: ginajonze@potmail.com
Subject: please forward this to anyone and everyone who might care, love you
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2002 22:56:00 +0000

One of the sharp ironies of life is that you can be caught up in history, in the violence of judgment, simply for being there. We can cry out, try in vain to control things, but, finally, there’s a momentum not unlike the waves in an unfathomable ocean that pushes us on. The only thing we can do is try and understand it - and accept it. I fell into a tide pool and was sucked down into the depths of hypocrisy, the design of which I’m only now beginning to understand. The authors of this tragic play found a useful extra in my person, however unwilling I was to be fully complicit. Now I’m into something much deeper than I originally thought.

I’m writing this from far away, in whereabouts of which I can’t divulge. It would mean my life.

On the day in question - the day of Pepe’s immolation - I disappeared, never to return. It was as if providence had my car and my keys stolen. It was as if I was never meant to return. I made the largest withdrawal I could from an automatic teller, got on a bus, and headed south. What was there for me in The City? I had no job, no life really other than the listlessness which I was determined not to return to.

Who hasn’t had the fantasy of disappearing and assuming a totally new identity? That was my plan - to get away from all this. I bought a fake ID for fifty bucks off some Mexicans in LA and blew out like El Niño. My plan is to explore, to learn, and ultimately, to respect. I still have to participate, do the things that normal people do, but I do these things with lucidity. And it’s not just about the money, though that’s an inevitable fact of life. I simply don’t believe that there’s a grand idea out there waiting to be discovered, to save us from ourselves. That kind of self-hatred has led to unbelievable carnage.

The news trickles over here sometimes. Especially big news. Terrorist attacks and workplace massacres make for news just about anywhere. The Sealed ASS incident made the news because it was the first of its kind in the States. No one had self-immolated until Pepe staggered in that day. The news talked about a disgruntled worker who was fired from his job a few months earlier. It talked about an estranged wife, about alcohol, and finally about “a heretofore unknown terrorist cell”. After the bombing an email vindicating the attacks was sent by Islamic fundamentalists - taking advantage of someone else’s outrageous, bloody statement. I, obviously, know better.

The body count was made, and a total of four people were found dead. Pepe, Alvaro, Tony, and Janine, the receptionist that tried to stop Pepe. She unwittingly saved my life by doing her job and blocking the entrance to our upstairs offices. Witnesses were called forth, and an investigation was underway. All were accounted for, except me. I’d left earlier that day and no one knew a thing about me. One temp said he saw me leave the factory in a state of great agitation. No shit, great agitation indeed. When all attempts to contact me failed, the FBI and the local police tried my apartment. What they found inside were things exactly as I’d left them. My squalor, my music, my books... everything. Some clever dick assessed the situation and came up with a theory. I had books - lots of them - but apparently only the ones about “subversive” elements caught their attention. God knows what they consider subversive these days. Just words and names, regardless of context, have been enough to demonize me. Names like Marx, Bin Laden, Kaczynski (I had the original New York Times manifesto) - probably literary seers like Orwell or Burroughs are also considered dangerous. The important thing, always, is to have a critical eye. “Don’t take no guff from those swine,” as one famous drug addict once put it. They also found my writing (I left a hard copy of the satire I wrote about Roger Rogers - the everyman in corporate America - along with other notes scattered about the apartment). I’d neglected to look at those things for a while now, since I’d gone on that rollercoaster corporate adventure. According to them, my writing was “critical of the American way of life, with a subversive, apocalyptic bent... clearly the work of a deranged, misguided individual...”. And here’s the cincher. They found evidence of Islamic infiltration - food wrappings - that caused investigators to believe that I had sympathies with, or was part of, a terrorist cell. What they were referring to was the wrapper and half-eaten falafel sandwich I’d left on the kitchen counter a couple days earlier. That was enough to implicate me. Now I’m wanted for “questioning”. I haven’t heard anything about Baxter. Sternislouse must’ve gotten him off the hook. That’s where the buck really stops.

So I do what I can now, but it’s hard not to have a past, not to be able to talk about myself. That’s why I write: to put something out there, to express myself. Even if people won’t believe that behind all this was some spoiled brat who held a grudge against his father. The point is not to reap material rewards, or to expiate myself for my small hand in this affair. It’s become something else entirely. It’s become a mode of survival. Yes, these notes from the underground allow me to live with equanimity simply because they allow me to be me.