Stone Cold Memories r2662

Stone Cold Memories

Nick Zentor

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The True Story of a Victim of 25 Years of Gas-Lighting and Lies

A victim of lies and gas-lighting recalls the events of his youth and how they caused him to become completely alienated from humanity by late 1982. The events covered within this story are all based upon real, factual events. Only the proper names of the people and some of the places have been changed, to protect the innocent.

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Stone Cold Memories by Nick Zentor

Copyright: Coldpost-85, 2021

All Rights Reserved

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For all the victims of gas-lighters and pathological liars in the multiverse.

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Contents

Introduction: How I was Gas-Lighted by a Fascist

Prologue: A Complex Case

Chapter 1: Memory Retrieved, Summer, 1994

Chapter 2: The Pathology to the Step-Brother's Lies

Chapter 3: I'm Not His Stupid Little Brother

Chapter 4 : The Sabotage of Ninth Grade Algebra in 1973

Chapter 5: The Fool's Errand of 1975

Chapter 6: 1976: The Odd Man Out

Chapter 7: The Phony Photo-Ops of 1977

Chapter 8: The Naked Club of 1978: How I was Kicked Out of Suburban Paradise

Chapter 9: 1979 - 1980: The Social Rejection and Downfall of a Victim of Lies

Chapter 10: Late 1980 to 1982: Working with Derk

Chapter 11: 1982: A Discharge from the Air Force and Accident in late 82

Chapter 12: 1983: Lost in Los Angeles

Chapter 13: 1984: A Day in the Twilight Zone of the Outer Limits

Chapter 14: 1985 - 1990: An Ambition to Work for in a Loveless Purgatory

Chapter 15: 1991 - 1995: Memory Retrieved in 1994

Chapter 16: The Final Word

Afterward: A Message for Mother

Afterword: The Refracted Lens

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Introduction

How I was Gas-Lighted by a Fascist

I am a victim of a pathological liar and a gas-lighter. My name is Nick Zentor and I am a science-fiction writer. I was born around the time Rod Serling was busy working with the foundations for what became one of the most popular science-fiction and fantasy serials ever conceived, "The Twilight Zone", which was first aired in late 1959.

My case is quite complex. I have been left suspended within a very difficult disposition, where I have to expose the pathological liar and gas-lighter to exonerate myself from the guilt he has placed upon me. It has become too much of a burden for me to continue to carry such guilt and I have no choice but to use everything at my meager disposal as my defense.

Therefore, I have chosen to use a method for telling my story in which the proper names of the people and places have been changed to protect the innocent. This is another way of telling the whole truth without making matters any worse than they already are, by simply not exposing exactly who the real people are and just asg everyone fictional names.

As a matter of fact, I am also protecting myself, by not sharing the real name of the pathological liar and gas-lighter who victimized me, because he "gagged me with a threat", some time in the early 1970s, and I have been fearing for my life ever since. Because he had me gagged and I couldn't talk about him to anyone, he was able to keep me quiet while he destroyed me, with one lie after another, over the years.

There's more about the "gag-threat" he put upon me in the story. The point is, it took me some time to recover my memory, after an accident in late 1982, and to learn how to write well, and discover the right formula for writing, to find a way to get around the gas-lighting pathological liar's "gag-threat" upon me.

So, now I can tell the story about him, expose him for what he did to me, and hopefully exonerate myself, without making the situation worse than it already is. That's the theory. All I can do is give it my best try. I cannot continue to ignore the violations upon my rights and the damage that those violations have had upon my life.

In 2019, I published a science-fiction mystery called, "The Last Resort", which was actually an attempt to exonerate myself, which used the same method, in which the proper names were changed to protect the innocent. That story, however, was somewhat different because it was a fiction which used a past reality and real people who were involved in that reality as a background.

The only part about "The Last Resort" that is "factual" is everything contained within excerpts from a "Defense Report", which includes factual background information about the real past and actual events which did occur within reality, between 1960 and 2000, more or less.

"The Last Resort" was based upon the "factual" reality from the past, and acted as a projection, after those facts, following the "possible" exoneration of myself, through an "alter ego", within a science-fiction mystery, which I thought would make the whole story more interesting.

In contrast, "Stone Cold Memories" is all based upon factual events from the past and is therefore a "non-fiction", however, because it uses the method by which the proper names are changed to protect the innocent, it may have to be shared as "fiction".

It may also be considered "biographical" because it contains real, factual events within my past life. Furthermore, it may be thought of as the "abridged version" of my "Defense Report". The "unabridged version" may come later.

Within the story, 2 different versions of myself are used for perspective: Ren Tenrut is the younger version, from before the accident in 1982, and Zek Stone is the older version, which began after I decided to return to the east coast in 1985, to pursue an ambition to be a science-fiction writer.

Technically, Ren Tenrut did not become Zek Stone until 2018, when I made a legal name-change, but I used a "pseudonym" like "Zek Stone" as a sciencefiction writer, when I began writing science-fiction in 1985. However, because the "legal" name-change did not occur until later in 2018, much of the "excerpts" from the "Defense Report" still use the name "Ren Tenrut", even though they were written after 1985.

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Gas-Lighting: An action which involves a violation of an individual's rights

which is denied by the perpetrator(s) after the fact, and repeated, multiple times, over a period of time, while being denied and covered up completely, every time.

Gas-lighters are pathological liars who use their ability to deny the truth and lie without conscience against their victims, to completely dominate them, oppress them beneath their will-power, and eventually, enslave them.

The denials after the violations are followed by suggestions that the victims were "dreaming" or "having a bad dream". Sometimes, the victims get accused of "making things up" in their heads, due to "wild imaginations". Sometimes, they even get accused of "lying" by the perpetrator, to cover their guilt.

Gas-lighting is an extreme violation of an individual's rights which has been connected to "schizophrenic refractions" and insanity, and it is considered a very dangerous, criminal practice.

As a victim of gas-lighting and lies I have been forced to re-evaluate the course of my indisol back in time. After recalling everything that happened before the accident in late 1982, logic has deduced that the course of my indisol was refracted by the "misinformation" and lies of my step-brother between 1975 and 1982.

Logic has deduced that the course of my indisol was severely refracted after the accidental death in late 82, and transferred to another parallel "shadow" Earth, which I came to refer to as Aton 5. I refer to it as a "shadow Earth" because it lacks the full spectrum of the home-parallel, along with the Constitutional protections known as "individual rights".

"Individual rights" were taken away within the Aton 5 parallel by the "Neokons" in 1981, under the "Zero Tolerance" policies introduced to fight the first "perpetual war" referred to as the "war on drugs", an absurd totalitarian violation upon everyone's bodies that turned everyone into robots with keys in their backs.

It was after returning to work in 1985, after a homeless vacation in southern California for a couple of years, when I first began to realize the differences. I had managed to avoid the war-front while homeless, but it was impossible to ignore it on the daily and nightly news bulletins every day once I had returned to work.

While watching cable-tv one day, I caught a historical piece on the history channel about the Neokons taking the White-House and starting the "war on drugs", and I began to wonder how I had managed to miss something like that before the accident.

My memory was fuzzy about the time-period, between 1980 and 1982, because I was unemployed, homeless, and hungry most of the time. I have to it, I didn't really have much time for the cable-tv news.

Because I had suffered memory-loss after the accident in 82, I just wasn't quite certain about any of it. But eventually, after recalling enough, I realized what had happened. It was almost impossible to believe, but I had apparently been transferred to another "parallel" of Earth.

It was a close parallel but it was different. The loss of Constitutional and individual rights made it much more difficult for the common, poor, workingclass human. It was more like a dystopia than the home-parallel I knew before the accident.

I know it may sound unbelievable, but even if it is just a form of "Multiverse Theory" which I cannot prove, it has provided just the kind of objective perspective that I needed to get over the forest and make sense out of the trees.

It took me a decade, after the accident in late 1982, to recover certain details within my memory that implicated my step-brother as being the source of misinformation which was fed to mother and used as an excuse to have me sent away in the summer of 1975.

It took me 4 decades to finally find a secure post where I could compose, format, and publish my books, share my experiences, and make some kind of sense out of the confusion. I realize now that my indisol has been refracted by the lies of the step-brother and my indisol has been refracted within the eyes of others by those same lies.

I realize also, though I cannot prove it, that I died after that accident in 1982 and my indisol was transferred, based upon the refraction caused by those lies. Unfortunately, the death and transfer was "accidental" and I was not prepared for it. My state of mind at the time was not good and I was, in fact, a victim of gaslighting and lies. To say that I was confused would be putting it lightly.

Four decades later, as I sit in the junk-boat office rethinking it all, I have come to one very definite conclusion about the disposition of my indisol. My indisol was refracted away from the home-parallel by the step-brother's lies and as a victim of lies, I cannot ignore what such a refraction has done to me.

To regain control over the direction of my indisol, I have to have a better understanding of the refraction, and to have a better understanding of the refraction, I have to know everything that caused it.

Aside from the memory loss, there was also the "gag" that was put on me, by the step-brother, some time in the early 70s, which also suppressed many memories. This subject is covered in chapter four and seven, in more detail.

It was an obvious "gag-threat upon my life", which I took quite seriously at the time, which forced me to keep my mouth shut about everything he did, including his continuous torture of me.

My step-brother was one of the biggest lying fascists in the known universe and he actually managed to fool everyone into believing his lies about me, and that is why I am writing this book.

This book uses a formula for getting around gas-lighting pathological liars who use "gag-threats" to keep their victims quiet.

Nick Zentor (aka Zek Stone and Ren Tenrut)

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Prologue: A Complex Case

At this time, I am completely alone within the Aton 5 parallel, just as I have been for most of the 38 years since I was originally transferred, after the accident in late 1982. There has been no love for me in this parallel and I have wondered why it has been so difficult and I have finally reached some dire conclusions about my case.

I am convinced now that this has been a loveless purgatory because I made a bad mistake in 1978 which turned all of the girls, and most of the boys, against me. Because they did not understand that my step-brother had lied to our mother in 1975, and had me sent on a fool's errand to separate me from the girl I was seeing at that time, they did not understand why I reacted the way I did and they resented and hated me for it. All of the girls rejected me.

Apparently, I failed to provide them with the actual reason, for my reaction in 78, before the accident, because the step-brother had gagged and gas-lighted me into submission, and he got away with it, because the step-father took sides with him. He was able to do all kinds of evil things to me and simply deny it after the fact, and he got away with it, because the step-father always believed him and never believed me.

They did not understand what the evil step-brother had done to me, how he had hurt me and worked against me, how he had gas-lighted me and lied to our mother and the family. They did not know that he had me "gagged with a threat", to keep me from talking about him with anyone.

The step-brother fooled them all into believing his lies. He simply did a few

"photo-ops" in front of the sisters now and then, where he pretended to be a "good" brother to me, then after they left us alone, he went back to hurting me and denying and lying about it again. With the step-father on his side, he could lie his way out of anything.

It did no good for me to tell anyone in the family about any of the evil things the step-brother did to me when they were not there, because all he had to do was deny it and get the step-father to take sides with him.

As long as it was my word against his, the step-father always believed him and never believed me. Because the step-father's judgment was absolute within the family, everyone was led to believe that the step-brother was being truthful and I wasn't, and they all trusted his word and not mine.

Well, the step-brother was a liar, and because the step-father always took sides with him against me, he always got away with lying about me, and in the end, he managed to turn the whole family against me. After the summer of 1978, he managed to turn the whole world against me, in much the same way, by pretending to be a "good" brother while perpetuating denials and lies about the way he treated me privately.

He fooled everyone that way for over 20 years, between 1960 and 1982. After the accident, in late 1982, my indisol was transferred to the shadow earth known as Aton 5, as punishment for my "refraction" away from the peaceful, utopian community that the home-parallel had planned at that time.

My "refraction" was based upon the "lies" of my step-brother, who managed to fool everyone into believing that he was the "good" brother and I was the "bad" one, simply by lying well and sharing the same exact name with his senior counterpart, the step-father.

In light of all of this, the best I could expect to be able to do was become a science-fiction writer, and expose the evil lying fascist for all of the evil things he did, within some kind of "defensive report".

Ergo, I have written "Stone Cold Memories" to share the truth about what really happened between my step-brother and I, and the family, friends, and community, between 1960 and 1982, and it tells a much different story than the one the step-brother was telling the whole time.

For beyond all doubt, let it be known by all now from this day forward, that my step-brother, Jarges Tenrut, was a huge liar.

The events recorded within the main contents of this book are actual events which did, in fact, occur, between approximately 1964 and 2000. The proper names of the people and some of the places involved within the recorded events have been changed to protect the innocent and avoid copyright violations.

Zek Stone (aka Ren Tenrut) 2021-06-17

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Chapter One: Memory Retrieved, Summer, 1994

Zek Stone sat with his eyes closed, in the Junk Boat Office, and imagined he was somewhere else. He imagined he was sitting on a bench, over-looking and enjoying a beautiful scenic setting. It was one of his favorite settings, one he had discovered a long time ago and rediscovered in a memory, while suffering from a nervous breakdown in the late summer of 2016.

It had helped him calm down and relaxed his nerves, and he had learned to love it like no other memory he ever had.

He gazed out over the distance, through an open field aligned by trees on one side and a small coastal town on the other side, out onto a great wide, coast of sandy beaches, snaking into the distant horizon.

As he sat there suspended with wonder, feeling some much-needed peace of mind, she came to him and he heard her gentle voice in her mind.

"Tell me," her soft voice said to him, in his left ear, "about how you learned that your step-brother had lied to your mother in the summer of 1975."

It was a voice he had come to understand and trust like no other. It didn't impose itself upon him, it merely made the suggestion, to let him know she was there and was interested.

He saw her for a split-second at the corner of his eyes, but didn't want to lose the setting, so just accepted that she was there, and thought about what she said.

"I had to recover the memory," he said, as he sat there and continued to enjoy the view. "It's a bit of a long story, but I guess if I have to share it, it might as well be now."

He respired, recalled the memory of the past decades, and recalled the time at which he recovered the memory, which had been lost for almost 20 years.

"It was in 1994," he said, and began to tell her the story, as his mind drifted back in time to see it all in his memory, as if it were just yesterday.

"I had just lost a job with a department store, and I was looking for a place, a hole in the wall, where I could continue with my small-publishing ambitions. I guess you could say that I went back to school, but I actually did the homecorrespondence thing and learned it all on my own, for the most part, with some help from some local associates and friends.

"It wasn't easy, but it was what I had to do, so I did it, in spite of all of the problems, which I had to take one step at a time to resolve. You see, I had to pursue the ambition that had brought me back to the east coast, in spite of the criticism I was forced to tolerate from the family.

"I mean to say, they thought I was a fool for thinking I could be a science-fiction writer, and even more of a fool for turning down the job they offered for me to be one of their store managers.

"I knew what kind of life to expect as a store manager and I was honestly afraid that it would prevent me from writing science-fiction, because it was a full-time career position. I was very serious about writing science-fiction, one might even say completely obsessed by the notion.

"Unfortunately, even though I pursued it to the best of my abilities, I learned later in the mid-90s that there was no demand for any new science-fiction and the science-fiction books weren't selling so well. They told me that sciencefiction books were simply not popular anymore and there was no money in it.

"I learned this from every publisher that I submitted my work to, and that was one of the reasons why I decided to go into small-publishing; so that I could selfpublish my own books. Well, in 1994, that's basically what I started doing. I learned all I needed to know to desk-top publish my own books and started working through the copy-outlets to complete the final product.

"Before getting into that, I had a novel that had to be completed, which I had begun while I still had the job at the department store. I had my books in a briefcase everywhere I went, while I was looking for a hole in the wall and a place to plug in the electric typewriter."

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Zek Stone needed an "affordable" place to live in the summer of 1994 and spent a couple of weeks living in motels before he could find anything. During that time, when he wasn't busy looking for a place, using the phone and talking to people, he was working on a science-fiction novel that was to be the third book in a trilogy, of which 2 had already been completed.

The novel was very important, even more important than he realized at the time, because it used a time-traveling device that helped him to recover lost memories, memories which had been lost after an accident in late 1982, memories from before his accidental transfer to the Aton 5 parallel.

On July 20th, he sat at the table in the small kitchenette aded to the bedroom, and looked at the notes he had been taking, wondering where he was going from there. He had just one day left, after this one, at the motel, and his week would be up.

He didn't want to have to spend another week there; it was too expensive and would take too much of his savings away. He knew he needed the money to get into a more permanent apartment and was busy trying to find such a place.

He had run into a serious problem and didn't know how to get around it. The realtors that rented out all of the "affordable" apartments had a strict rule about who could have the privilege of renting any one of their apartments. The rule was the renter had to receive a monthly income which was equal to 3x the rent. For example, if the monthly rent were $300, the renter had to make at least $900

a month.

Unfortunately for Zek, he only received around $750 a month at the time and $300 a month was the lowest rental rate for apartments in the state. He fell short by $150, and felt extremely disappointed as he was turned away by one realtor after another in his desperate search for an apartment.

He stepped up from the kitchen table, had a drink of water, and stepped into the bedroom. He stopped and looked the place over, and wished he could simply stay there. It was one of the most comfortable places he had ever lived.

It had a nice big, comfortable bed, wall-to-wall carpeting, a perfectly modern bathroom and shower (the old house he'd been raised in actually had no shower, just a bathtub), a neat little ading "modern" kitchenette with the most upgraded appliances, and a heavy glass sliding door that opened onto a beautiful backyard garden of flowers and grass.

Zek had spent most of his previous life living in old, run-down houses or apartments, when he wasn't homeless or living in a tent in the forest. This "hotel room", which was actually a small, "efficiency" apartment, was one of the most modern and comfortable places he had ever rested his weary bones within, and he wished he could just stay there and continue writing science-fiction, without having to worry about the rent.

He knew it was impossible because he simply did not make enough money to keep it up. So he went back to work on the problem and wondered how he was

going to get around that strict rule the realtors had about the renter's income. It was a tough one, for sure. Every realtor he had spoken to followed the same rule.

When he asked one of them why they all followed it, they told him that lowincome renters were considered unreliable and the rule was made by the state's rental association and everyone had to follow it.

He was shocked by this information because it meant that there was no "legitimate" way for him to rent any apartment from any of them who followed that rule, and according to what he was told, just about all of them did.

But he dug deeper and eventually found exceptions to the rule when someone applied for "low income" status with a special organization that helped lowincome people. But not before he was forced to spend another week in yet another motel further north, in a town where he had an old friend who helped him out now and then.

He stayed at the motel in August, while he followed up on the application for "low-income" status with the organization in town. It was during that week that he managed to complete the third novel of the science-fiction trilogy.

He had the electric typewriter plugged into the apartment and hammered away at the last chapters with excitation and enthusiasm. He was using the space and time-travel vehicle at the time, as the main characters worked on resolving a problem with a major catastrophe which had been caused by unknown alien interventions within human history on Earth.

He took the space and time-travel vehicle back to 1975 and his home-town and recovered the details of a memory that had been lost for almost 20 years. It involved a confrontation between him and his step-brother.

The time-period was before Stone had the name-change. At the time, his name was Ren Tenrut.

The step-brother had instigated the confrontation, as he always did, and demanded that Ren tell him the name of the girl he was seeing.

Ren refused to tell the step-brother what he wanted because he did not trust the selfish young man. Ren knew how evil his step-brother was and feared the fool would ruin it for him, so he refused to tell him her name.

As Ren left the kitchen that night, after the confrontation, and headed out to see his friends (and the girl), the step-brother cursed him as he stepped out the door into the early evening. He knew his step-brother was jealous but that was his problem. The step-brother was a selfish, spoiled-brat pig who had more than his share of girlfriends.

It wasn't Ren's fault if the step-brother failed to have a girlfriend to date at that time. It was usually the other way around. Ren was usually the one who had no date and the step-brother was the one who usually had a date with the girls.

If for once, Ren finally had a date with a pretty young girl and the step-brother did not -- well, that was his problem. Ren didn't want him to take Vesa from him. So he chose not to surrender the information.

Zek Stone recorded the event from an external objective, while spying from the space-time machine through Ren Tenrut's eyes, and the details of the event all came back to him. There was a chase after the aliens who were the cause of the intervention, after the "event" between him and his step-brother at the old house.

After the final chapter was done, he sat back and thought about it, relieved that the work had finally been completed. He thought about the confrontation with his step-brother in 1975, just one or two weeks before the "fool's errand", and recalled what his mother had told him after the accident in late 1982.

She had told him at that time that she had made a "mistake" when she sent him away in the summer of 1975, and itted that she had done it because she wanted to get him away from the girl.

The mistake his mother itted to was a mistake in the "identity" of the girl he was seeing. She itted that she thought he was seeing the older sister "Lucinda", not the younger sister Vesa. As he recalled these facts, he suddenly realized what had happened.

Mother had been "misinformed" by the step-brother, who intentionally wanted to get him away from the girl, because he wanted her for himself.

The step-brother had intentionally lied to the mother, or ed on the "misinformation" which led her to believe he was seeing the older sister of Vesa, "Lucinda", who had a "bad reputation", and the mother had reacted in fear that the girl would corrupt him, and sent him away that summer to get him away from her.

Zek sat there with the manuscript on the table before him, suddenly enlightened by all of the facts coming together. The space-time vehicle had helped him recover the details of a lost memory, and the details of that memory had enlightened him about what had actually happened in the summer of 1975.

He finally understood what had happened when he was sent on the fool's errand, and he knew what had caused his indisol to become hell-bent and refracted after the fact. It was not his mistake, nor was it his mother's mistake. It was a mistake intentionally caused by his evil step-brother, Jarges.

The logic could not be denied. The step-brother had lied or ed on misinformation which led to his refraction and eventually, to his accidental death in late 1982.

The facts and the logic could not be denied.

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Journal Notes: 2021-01-05

"I finally narrowed my case down to specific issues and points which were used to judgment upon me after the accident in late 1982.

"According to my step-brother's lies, which were apparently used against me at the time, I was some kind of ultra-conservative religious-right fascist, simply because I declined his invitation to get naked with him and his friends in the summer of 1978. To make my case even more controversial and worse, according to another lie he told about me, I was also some kind of "gay weaklink" who didn't like girls.

"At the time, during the late 1970s, the subject of "gayness" was highly controversial, and any time anyone was accused of it there was a very mixed reaction, all of which completely missed the point if the accusation was a lie to begin with. I was not gay, but my step-brother managed to spread a lie about me being gay nonetheless, and some people actually were inclined to believe in the "possibility".

"My step-brother's lies were used as weapons to hurt me. Don't let anyone ever lead you to believe that lies cannot be used as weapons. Apparently, it happens quite often. In fact, if we are to believe the ancient texts, we may all be victims of some of the biggest liars humanity has ever known.

"My step-brother wanted everyone to think I was too stupid to grow up and be a responsible adult, so he could continue to treat me like a dumb animal and a little punk kid in grade school, and a whipping post, of course. With that kind of power over another human being, step-brother set himself up as the fascist-incharge, the master with the whip abusing the servant and the slave.

"I was confused and did not understand that while i was "gagged" (see chapter 7) from talking about my step-brother, he was busy spreading lies about me to make me look stupid.

"After I was transferred to the Aton 5 parallel, after the accident, I was judged upon the basis of my step-brother's lies and kicked as far out in the cold as possible, such that I was homeless with nothing but the shirt on my back, at the end of the bread-line, by 1984.

"In time, I recovered a memory that had been lost after the accident, without actually realizing where I was or how i had been misjudged because of my stepbrother's lies. But eventually, after recovering the details of my memory, I was able to understand what had happened.

"As near as i can figure, the Neokons and Neo-fascists who control the Aton 5 parallel were misled to believe my step-brother's lies about me, and misjudged me accordingly, based upon their own ultra-conservative family-values mentality.

"Apparently, the Neokons of the Aton 5 parallel decided that it was okay for me to be an ultra-conservative religious-right robot, and padded me on the back for that, because that was one of their phony fronts, but they persecuted me and made me feel ever-so guilty for being a "gay weak-link".

"It apparently did not occur to them that the step-brother was lying about either issues, and those who believed the latter lie hated me and persecuted me for it as a rule, while others pretended to go easy on me for it and tried not to joke and laugh.

"I can see it all now, in retrospect, after 40 years of being a victim of stepbrother's lies. I can see how the majority of people who were exposed to stepbrother's lies about me were inclined, somehow, to believe him without giving me a chance to defend myself.

"I can see how, from the way they treated me, there were those who believed step-brother's lies about me being his "stupid little brother" because of my "religious-right" attitude (just because i wouldn't get naked in 78), an attitude which was exaggerated by step-brother's lies, and held against me by them.

"Some of them actually thought I was "too stupid to grow up and be an adult" because of that fatal event in the summer of 1978. I see how they were joking and laughing behind my back after believing that load of malarkey that was fed to them by the step-brother, as he made sure the finger was pointed directly at me and my "stupidity" as the culprits (and not his evil ways).

"I can see how some of them who believed i was a "gay weak-link" hated me and persecuted me for that, even while it was also untrue. I see how I was confused by their treatment of me, time and time again, over the past 40 years, because I didn't know that I had been judged by them all upon the basis of my step-brother's lies.

"If they're supposed to be so smart, how is it that they failed to realize that my step-brother was a sibling-rival who hated me and lied about me all the time?

"How is it they failed to realize that he used lies to work against me, to push me out of human society?

"How is it they failed to see through that phony "good Christian brother" routine, and all of the phony photo ops, which ultimately, led to my complete rejection from society, ...

... and my accidental death by motorcycle in late 1982, an event which never would have happened if it were not for step-brother's lies?

"Well, I've figured out what they could not figure out, because it was my indisol that was refracted into the loveless purgatory by the lies.

"One: 1975; Two: 1978; Three: 1982

"Three strikes and the step-brother is out.

"The logic cannot be denied."

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Chapter Two: The Pathology to the Step-Brother's Lies

The simple pathology to the step-brother's lies was based primarily upon the premise that I could not be trusted to be a good member of the reality and community which he was born into before I was; in other words, the very home and family that we shared and that I had the terrible misfortune of being born into almost 2 years after him.

His sibling-rivalry and hatred for me was coupled with the fact that the stepfather treated me like a "bastard" in front of him and apparently seemed to agree with the step-brother, and that I couldn't be trusted, and therefore deserved to be punished.

In step-brother's mind, I was guilty the day I was born and started "stealing" mother's breast and love from him. As a result of the step-father's apparent prejudgment that I was a "bastard", the step-brother acted accordingly, and treated me like a "bastard".

He was a highly competitive, territorial fascist, who in sharing the old man's name with a "junior" attached to it, learned that he could abuse me and violate my rights, deny doing so after the fact, and always count on the step-father's .

With the step-father's , he made me out to be a liar, after this fact, and had me relegated to the role of a black-sheep bastard that deserved to be whipped and abused, to be taught a lesson, and then used as a scapegoat and tossed out with the trash.

He started his campaign to have me rejected by everyone some time shortly after i was born and started taking mother's attention from him. What bothers me is how the of the family and the larger community did not seem to recognize simple sibling-rivalry when my step-brother so obviously exhibited it almost every time I was given attention by any of them.

I mean to say, he never had anything good to say about me, always made me into a joke for everyone to laugh at, never stopped insisting that I was too "stupid" to do things that everyone did in everyday normal society, and constantly made me take the blame for everything that went wrong under the sun, moon, and the stars.

And yet, when he decided to make me look like the biggest fool in the world in the summer of 1978, nobody saw the coincidence there and everyone took sides with him against me.

It was probably the phony photo-ops he staged, in 77 and early 78, that fooled them.* And the fact that he was covering up one of the biggest lies he ever used against me, from the summer of 1975. ** That damage had already been done and he had gotten away with it.

I'm guessing that the ones he fooled with his lies took the majority on the vote and the smart ones simply didn't care, because they were just too busy chasing skirts in their new "utopian" community, where young girls were going pantiless on purpose, just for the fun of it, and forgetting about the snakes who love to

dominate the garden.

Step-brother was very clever to lie in such a way that he could actually make me look like I never wanted to have any "fun" in suburban paradise, the way "everyone" else wanted it, and they acted accordingly, in reaction to his lies, and had me kicked out of the summer club, out of suburban paradise, into a loveless purgatory, as punishment for my "stupidity".

Unbelievable isn't it, how the power of lies can destroy human lives?

I would find it difficult to believe also if I were not a victim.

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Once step-brother had lied and gotten away with it, it became a regular practice for him to lie in some way and get me in trouble, after doing something bad, like braking my toys or physically hurting me.

This point must not be ignored: After step-brother denied doing something bad to hurt me, the step-father believed him and was led to believe that I was a liar. Thereafter, I was made out to be the liar, not the step-brother, and he was able to get away with hurting me and lying after the fact any time he felt like it. The step-father always believed his lies and never believed me.

One thing about pathological liars that should be understood when attempting to understand the pathology of my step-brother's lies is that once the pathological liar has committed the act of lying and got away with it, they must never say anything that would expose them for lying and are forced to lie to cover up previous lies, over a period of time. The result is often quite confusing depending upon the size of the lie.

Of course, in my own case, step-brother managed to use a fall-back excuse against me whenever it seemed like he would be exposed: he claimed that I was "too stupid" to know what was right and it was therefore all my fault.

He was the kind of step-brother who would keep something from me that I needed to know, to make me look stupid, and claim that he told me and i forgot about it because I was too stupid to things.

Whenever he did make me look stupid for not knowing that he didn't tell me something that I needed to know, everyone actually bought into the idea that I was stupid. It was a very effective way of making me look stupid to of the family and extended family.

The very worst thing about the pathology of step-brother's lies was that it actually succeeded, along with the step-father's , in leading everyone in the family to believe that step-brother was the good one and I was the "bad" one. Eventually, after being completely rejected by human society, it led to my destruction by motorcycle accident in late 1982.

I died and was judged based upon the lies of a step-brother who was a pathological liar who made me out to be too stupid to grow up and be a normal adult. He made me out to be an untrustworthy, incompetent fool who couldn't be counted on to do what was right, as if I deserved to be punished.

He made me out to be a retarded fool stuck on the grade-school level and unable to grow up and be an adult. He made me out to be a "stupid little brother" who could be used to take the blame for anything that went wrong, simply because I was so "stupid".

He made me out to be anything but an equal to himself and the others of our generation and class, a "lower life-form" to be kept at a distance, in a cage, or under close supervision, while perpetuating the idea that I really was too stupid to be a responsible adult and too stupid to have a normal life to begin with.

From my decades of experience with such morons who think they are superior to me, I have learned that whenever an evil step-brother who pretends to be a "good" brother by lying well and fools everyone makes a little brother out to be "stupid", there are more than enough brothers willing to believe it just so they can "pull rank" and use such a "stupid little brother" to play the fool for them, just for laughs.

It's almost like step-brother sold tickets to all the brothers who wanted a chance to pull rank on me and use me to play the fool. It was a very fascist club.

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Now, we come to one of the worst problems with pathological liars such as Jarges. Once they have lied and gotten away with it, and they cannot let themselves become exposed as liars, they continue to perpetuate the same lies and if they have to, they invent new lies to cover the old ones.

Sometimes, all the liar has to do is feign innocence and pretend they have nothing new to add, but sometimes they can't play stupid and have to say something, and when they do, it's usually another lie to cover the previous one.

When the pathological liar lies and covers lies in this way for a long period of time, it may actually get in over its head, after the lies that have been told have caused enough confusion and it becomes necessary to find other methods besides lying to cover itself from exposure.

In this way, pathological liars may resort to using methods they did not originally intend using, if they were backed into a corner, including bribery, blackmail, and sometimes simple money-transactions in exchange for the of the lies.

For example, after Jarges lied to the mother to have Ren separated from Vesa, in the summer of 1975, and covered up the lie, when Ren failed to be the only male member of his class who did not have a "date" to the graduation prom, in 1976,

Jarges led everyone to think it was because Ren was not only "weak", but "gay" also.

Ren was heart-broken with a bleeding heart, and the cold-hearted liar Jarges told everyone he was "weak" because he was "gay", just to cover up the fact that he lied in the summer of 1975 to get Ren away from Vesa, the girl he was seeing at the time. In this way, Jarges pointed the blame away from himself and made sure that Ren took all of the blame.

The method was very effective, mainly because Jarges was the junior name-sake to the senior Jarges and the old man believed everything his younger version told him about Ren, including the lies.

When Ren realized that Jarges had done something devious behind his back in the summer of 1975 but he couldn't prove it without some kind of substantial proof, he decided to buy some time while doing the detective work. Unfortunately, he couldn't find anything substantial that Jarges wouldn't simply deny and get away with, as was his common practice.

After the summer of 75, when Ren ran into him, Jarges was feigning complete innocence and pretending to be nothing but a good brother. As if he did nothing wrong.

It was at that time that Ren began to quietly despise him for what he really was. To Ren, he was a selfish, lying, spoiled-brat fascist-pig. But accusing Jarges of being such a pig would only serve to make him mad and then there would be a fight. After that, Ren would be punished for starting it. Who knew what kind of

punishment that would be? Ren didn't like to think about such things.

Jarges was unpredictable when it came to punishments. Sometimes, he would just play a practical joke on Ren and humiliate him in public, in front of his friends. Other times, he would torture him or hurt him in a way that left a wound, or he would steal something from him, like money or something of value.

Jarges was apparently capable of doing anything to Ren, short of putting him in the hospital or the grave, as long as there were no witnesses that cared to expose him, because Jarges was a practiced, pathological liar and the step-father, the senior Jarges, always took his side.

Jarges had actually "gagged" Ren with a threat upon his life once, in the early 1970s and Ren had agreed to go along with it, because he actually believed that the step-brother could have him killed and lie his way out of it, with the full of the step-father, his "senior" name-sake. ***

Ren agreed to keep his mouth shut on the subject of Jarges' shenanigans, to buy time to find a good job and get away from the dynamic duo and the hell Jarges had put him through under his "good" brotherly care.

Ren hoped that he could get away from the two Jarges soon, since he was due to graduate from high school in 1976. He didn't expect things to get any worse than they were.

Unfortunately, they did, in the summer of 1978. Things got much, much worse. Things got more worse than even an amateur science-fiction writer could possibly imagine. ****

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Appx. 1964-05-01:

Ren was no more than 6 or 7 years old when the step-brother told his first big lie. They were living in an old house in the north end of Springfield, at the end of Baltic Avenue, in an area next to a factory zone which was slowly falling to pieces and turning into slums. The house was on a street that bordered a huge apartment complex which was dominated by immigrants and lower-class minority groups who all resented their wealthy "white" landlords.

Before Ren's poor "white" family managed to escape that troublesome area, all kinds of bad things occurred involving youth gangs, crimes, and misunderstandings. Among the multiple noteworthy incidents Ren could recall included the time an older black girl stole money from him outside a local store, money that was given to him by his mother to buy bread that they needed, and the other time the brand-new stingray bike he had just recieved for his birthday was stolen outside another store, after someone lied to him and told him it was safe.

But the one memory that really stood out most was the time Ren's step-brother Jarges lied, for the first time, in a way that Ren could not ignore lightly. It was a major violation of Ren's individual rights and something he could not forget, in spite of the "gas-lighting effect" of step-brother's pathological lies backed by the step-father's every time.

The details about the exact time and date were lost by the young mind of Ren, but he did recall what happened on that day. For some unknown reason, the parents had to leave Ren alone with Jarges, and before they left the two alone, they told Jarges that he would be responsible for Ren, because he was almost 2 years older than Ren.

After the parents left them, Jarges began bossing Ren around, treating him like a subordinate slave who had to do everything his way. Ren didn't like being pushed around by Jarges, and protested. Jarges pushed him down to the floor, wrestled him down and twisted his arm behind his back and put him in pain and said, "I'm the boss! You have to do everything I say!"

Later, after the parents returned and Ren reported the violent action by Jarges, Jarges denied it all and made Ren out to be a liar. The step-father, the senior "Jarges", took sides with his younger name-sake and believed his denial, rather than the truth.

Ren was devestated by the ability the junior Jarges had to lie to the parents and get the senior Jarges to believe him. Shortly after Ren was scolded for lying, he began to feel as if he was in a level of hell and Jarges was the son of satan.

There was nothing he could do about it. Jarges was an evil step-brother who had the ability to lie to the step-father, the senior Jarges, and get away with it, and Ren was unable to prove he was not lying because there were no witnesses.

Thereafter, Ren found that Jarges had the ability to violate his rights, abuse his authority over Ren, and deny it all after the fact, while making him out to be a liar, and the senior Jarges believed him every time. It became such a common practice for Jarges to do such things and deny and lie and get away with it, that in retrospect, Ren realized it was a form of gas-lighting.

The term "gas-lighting" refers to a very insidious violation of an individual involving the violation first and the denial after the fact, leaving the victim of the violation doubting their own senses. When such violations are made over and over and denied every time, it amounts to a very serious psychological problem for the victim, including mental delusions and nervous breakdowns. Victims sometimes begin to confuse dreams with reality.

The pathology to the lies of Jarges involved such a "gas-lighting effect" for Ren, over a period of time, once it had become obvious to him that the step-father would never believe him over the junior Jarges. Jarges used the power he had over Ren to control him, once it was realized that he could lie like that, and get away with it, and Ren could not do anything to stop him.

Ren had to let Jarges have some control over him to avoid the spoiled-brat's wrath and punishment. Jarges had taken the whip to him often enough and let him know who was boss and there really was nothing he could do about it, short of running away from home.

Jarges junior was a pathological liar who had proven that he could lie about Ren and always expect the "senior" Jarges to take his side. For Ren, it was just like being on a level of hell, with Satan and his spoiled-brat son.

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Foot-Notes:

* Phony Photo-ops: see chapter 7.

** Fool's errand of 1975: see chapter 5.

*** "Gag-threat": see chapter 3.

*** Summer of 1978: see chapter 8.

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Chapter 3: I'm Not His Stupid Little Brother

Ren Tenrut wrote in his journal:

"When I first returned to the east, to the "home-town" where I grew up and went to school, I didn't realize it at the time, but the extended family was looking at me through a refracted lens which was refracted by my step-brother's lies.

"It wasn't just the extended family, as i thought at first, but apparently, the entire local community of neighbors that I had grown up with and people i made friends with and went to school with; everyone was looking at me through a refracted lens that had been refracted by the step-brother's lies.

"Furthermore, his lies had made me look stupid, retarded, slow, and foolish. But because there were those that ed the idea that i was somewhat "mentally retarded" by illegal drugs or something, and condemned to reside within a lowIQ, grade-school level which prevented me from being an "adult" like them, they were also obliged to try and tolerate me with their "good Christian" side.

"In other words, they were willing to tolerate me in the same way they tolerated people who were "mentally retarded". I really did not understand how the lens had been refracted by step-brother's lies at the time. Because i really did not understand how step-brother had refracted the lens they all saw me through, I was forced to tolerate their treatment of me, without understanding why they did it.

"I found out how "mentally retarded" people were treated like grade-school children who can't play adult games. I found out how they can get some retarded people to work on all kinds of jobs but when the weekend came, while all the adults got to play "adult" games, they were treated like stupid kids and expected to simply get by on the same old board games and tea and cookies with grandma, while subjects like nudity and sex were kept "forbidden" to them.

"I found out that getting a job was much easier than getting into the local playboy club or the summer-play club, or any of the adult-oriented "social clubs" that the wealthier playboys apparently dominated.

"I found out that getting a job as a "mental retard" condemned to a grade-school level was much easier than getting a life. A life, as it turned out, was much too expensive, and every poor fool couldn't be a bullshitting gigolo with a big dick and marry into wealth like step-brother did.

"I found out that as a "mentally retarded" adult, I could do some jobs without any problem, but I couldn't have a girlfriend becuase I was too stupid and didn't make enough money to make up for my stupidity. Even a mental retard could probably have a girlfriend if he had enough money, if he managed to get over the fact that people thought he was stupid upstairs.

"But a poor mentally retarded adult doesn't stand a chance up against the competition. As a "poor" adult who had been made out to be "stupid" by a stepbrother's lies and forced to tolerate people looking at me the wrong way for the past 40 years, I really must protest.

"I'm not "his stupid little brother"! I am the victim of a pathological liar."

Ren Tenrut, 2021-04-05

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When Ren's family moved from the North End of Springfield to the suburbs of Mawaga, across the river from the big city, Ren found out that the house they were moving into wasn't quite so large as the picture made it look, nor was the yard. In fact, it turned out to be one of the smallest houses in the town and not really the best home for a family of seven.

Jarges hated sharing the same room with Ren but they had no choice because the house didn't have enough bed-rooms for everyone. The two sisters also had to share the same room, but they didn't hate each other the way Jarges hated Ren. Jarges treated Ren like it was all his fault that they had to share the same room, as if he, Ren, were somehow personally responsible.

Jarges treated him like an unwanted guest and made him feel guilty whenever they spent time together. Jarges was the biggest bully-fascist that Ren ever knew, and he had to share the same room with him for about twelve years, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

It wasn't any fun at all. It was a miserable, loveless purgatory, where Jarges

constantly whipped him and made him feel guilty.

When they went outside to "play" together and met some of the neighbors, Jarges introduced himself as someone who was smart and deserved equal respect, then he introduced Ren as "his stupid little brother", and told everyone to just ignore anything Ren said because he was an idiot and didn't know what he was talking about.

Everyone laughed when he said this and Ren was forced to tolerate their laughter "at him" whether he liked it or not. As it turned out, Ren didn't really like playing the role of the "stupid little brother".

But Jarges didn't care what Ren wanted and he didn't want Ren to be "smarter" than him. With Jarges, outside of the phony front he used to fool the mother and the sisters, Ren was treated as a sibling-rival and a part of the competition. Jarges bullied Ren to no end, and constantly made him feel stupid.

There was always some kind of competition over something with Jarges, whether it was the love of the mother or the sisters, or money or resources, or friends and a job. He also acted as if Ren was too stupid to know anything about girls and therefore should not be permitted to "associate with them", as if he couldn't be trusted with them or something.

In other words, he liked to pretend he was the rooster and keep Ren away from any girls he was interested in, and Jarges was interested in just about every pretty girl in town. Between 1970 and 1980, Jarges destroyed about half a dozen

opportunities Ren had with girls.

Jarges wanted to play the rooster and he wanted to treat Ren like the fox.

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In his efforts to make Ren look like a "bad investment" for the mother, sister, and extended family's , step-brother did everything he could to make Ren look "stupid".

The best analogy for this would be the case of the two wealthy kids who were students at the same private school. One appeared smarter than the other, and the one who was not as smart was jealous and willing to do anything to make the smarter one look stupid.

When they were in high school, Jarges failed to get ing grades in ninth grade and was kept back. Ren, in contrast, was doing fine. When Ren was forced to share classes with his older step-brother, he could see why.

Jarges couldn't stay in his seat for more than a minute, before he jumped up and began disrupting the class. He'd spend a few minutes dancing with the teacher, then be out the door.

As it turned out, Jarges was a young teenage gigolo who wanted to be the next wealthy playboy in town, and he didn't want Ren making him look stupid, so he did all he could to make Ren look stupid (when he wasn't busy chasing skirts).

In Jarges' mind, one didn't have to learn algebra, physics, chemistry, or any of that book-learned stuff, to become the next wealthy playboy in town. All one had to do was deal out sexual favors to the right women, and they could get almost any job they wanted. All Jarges could think of was how easy it would be to get in good with a wealthy widow and take an easy short-cut to all that wealth.

In the mean-time, he had to make Ren look really bad, otherwise he might lose the mother's and the sister's , which he needed badly to fool everyone into believing he was Prince Charming, and he didn't need Ren going to college, becoming a scientist, and making him look bad.

Egro, Jarges did everything he could to make Ren look "stupid", including the "sabotage of ninth grade algebra in 1973." *

* The Sabotage of Nineth Grade Algebra: see chapter 4.

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Journal: 2021-07-05

My youth was decades ago, and I can't recall everything in perfect chronological order, but I did manage to recover enough memories about "life with stepbrother" in the 1970s. I recovered enough to make me realize that step-brother was a bully-fascist who hated me and wanted to get me out of his way, even if he had to lie and use various forms of psychological warfare and manipulation, behind my back, to do it.

For example, in his efforts to force me to conform to the role of "his stupid little brother", within human society, for all to see and laugh at, he carelessly mixed his "big brother responsibilities" with his ability to take control of me like a robot and reduce my rank to "first-class fool" at his will, in front of everyone.

I first realized just how much he selfishly abused such powers over me some time in the early 70s, when he caught me making friends with some people that he had reserved as friends for himself, which he didn't want to share with me.

I was getting along fine with them, actually being somewhat "charming" with them, the way step-brother so often did with people in social situations, but then suddenly, the step-brother appeared and interrupted the whole thing and began making me feel guilty in front of them.

By the time he was done with me, he had made me look like a fool, and led the others, whom I had been getting along with just fine, to believe that I was "his stupid little brother" and apparently, I was just too stupid to be trusted.

Now, I realize it may seem hard for some people to believe, but that anecdote

was actually based upon a very real event. It left me feeling guilty just for turning on the "charm" with people without step-brother's permission.

I know, of course, upon retrospection years later, that step-brother simply did not want me to make any friends or be liked by any of "his friends". He didn't want to share them with me. He just wanted me to play "his stupid little brother", one of the dumbest fools in the world, while he played the much smarter, stronger, superior big brother.

The idea he had was to control me like a toy robot if he couldn't get me out of the way, and get me out of the way, after using me like a toy robot.

In either case, he obviously hated me. He just learned how to hide it better as he grew older and learned more tricks from the old man.

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Journal: 2021-07-6

The Gag Threat

I'm not sure exactly when this incident occurred, but I estimate in was some time

in the early 1970s, possibly 73, right after step-brother distracted the teacher at school.

I reported something that step-brother did, to the parents, because I thought it was funny and I thought they would think it was funny too, but they didn't think it was funny, and frowned. Step-brother denied it all, made me out to be a liar, and later, when we were upstairs, he forced me up against the wall, outside one of the bedrooms, with his hands around my throat.

"If you ever talk like that to anyone about me again, I'll kill you!" he said, in a serious, low voice, that I took very seriously.

I got the message alright. I took him very seriously because I knew he could probably do it and get away with it, just by blaming it on my "stupdity". With the of the step-father, his senior name-sake, he could get away with it. He could make it look like an accident and blame it on my stupidity, as he did with so many things in the past.

So, I took the threat seriously, and he had me "gagged".

I always thought I had a chance to escape the step-brother's power over me if i bought time and sought a good job and made more money. I didn't expect him to continue to make things bad for me, by abusing his powers over me, over and over again, until he did so much damage, I was pushed out of suburban paradise.

That "gag-threat" upon my life gave him an unfair advantage over me that I failed to see at the time.

It meant that he could say anything he wanted about me, even tell viscious lies about me, without my knowledge, and shape me like clay into any joke he could use to disrespect me, while I could say nothing about him to anyone, including all of the evil things he did to me (which he always denied and got away with anyhow).

It was an extreme violation of my rights.

I just didn't see any of it coming. Step-brother turned out to be quite a Prince Pugnacious, secretly seeking an easy way to completely destroy me, and I just did not see it coming.

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Journal: 2021-07-07:

This is how my step-brother turned me into his own personal robot.

First, he abused me and violated my rights. After I reported the violation to the parents, he denied it, made me out to be a liar, and got away with it. After that, the step-father favored him and he had his way, and I was forced to settle for becoming a constant victim of step-brother, in a continuous cycle of gas-lighting abuse and denials, for the first 20 years of my so-called life. It was more like being in a level of hell with Satan and his spoiled-brat son, than a life.

The two of them, the step-father and the step-brother, the senior and junior with the same exact names, gas-lighted me like that for 20 years. It was a continuous cycle in which the step-brother violated my rights, forced me into submission beneath his will-power, then denied it to the parents, the step-father took sides with him, and he got away with it.

By 1978, he had me almost completely under his control, whether I liked it or not, because I had learned that the only way to avoid his punishment was to let him have his way with everything. He was a complete and total control-freak who had managed to get away with controlling me for his own selfish whims, through a combination of gas-lighting, lying, and "gag-threats" upon my life.

The "gag-threat" had a way of suppressing my vocal chords, in much the same way that had me choked up against the wall just talking about him without his permission. All he had to do after that was look at me in the eyes and I couldn't talk. I knew that if I did, he would punish me.

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Chapter 4 : The Sabotage of Nineth Grade Algebra in 1973

After recognizing the success of the memory-probe in 1994, Stone recalled the year 1973, in which something very suspicious had gone wrong with Ninth Grade Algebra, and decided to try another memory-probe.

Zek Stone had just checked in to a lodge in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1995, after having a brief encounter with the local police. Stone had decided to hang out in his car in one of the town's parking lots for too long, over a holiday weekend, at the end of the month, before checking in to the lodge. Somebody from a local business got nosey and called the police, and the police arrested him under suspicion and for possession of one-half a t of ganja.

He spent a miserable weekend in the jail cell and got arraigned by a public defense on Monday, with a fine of $100 attached to the deal. He agreed to pay them $25 a month because he was in transit and surviving on a tiny monthly stipend at the time.

Once into a room at the lodge, he continued his work with small-publishing.

He had an idea that if he could put together enough short-stories, he could publish a bi-monthly or tri-monthly science-fiction and fantasy periodical digest.

As he sat back on the bed in the room one night, he had an idea about a man who had been separated from his home by unknown forces and imagined him being

taken by an energy vortex in the corridor, outside a parallel room at a parallel lodge... The story was referred to as "The Refracted Man".

While writing the Refracted Man, he recalled what had happened in Ninth Grade Algebra in 1973, and decided to add it to the "background color" for the story about the man, because it explained how he lost his opportunity to become a scientist and landed so low in the general labor field.

Stone thought about the "event" which he eventually referred to as "The Sabotage of Ninth Grade Algebra in 1973". At that time, there was nothing much he could do about it. The damage had been done and he was, like the character in the story, demoted and forced into the general labor field.

But the least he could do was record the "factual event" in some way, so he decided it helped explain "The Refracted Man's" lowly disposition, just as well as his own, for as he thought about the story, it ed through his mind, and he recorded it, and it opened up another wild fantasy world to his imagination. "The Refracted Man" was like his alter ego, daring to take the ride into the unknown, and a parallel counterpart to himself.

"The Sabotage of Ninth Grade Algebra in 1973" all came back to him at that time, in 1995, and it still bothered him. It bothered him that something like that could happen to begin with, because it was totally unethical and seemed like some kind of violation of individual civil rights. The problem was it had all happened so long ago there really was nothing that could be done about it. After 22 years, who would be interested?

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It was 1973 and Ren Tenrut was in his first year of "high school", referred to as "Ninth Grade". Unfortunately for him, his step-brother Jarges had been set-back one year for bad grades and Ren had to share some of his classes with Jarges and two other "bad grade" set-backs. There were 3 young men who had been setback, which Ren recalled as the "3 stooges" because they hung out together and somehow managed to bend and break the rules like pros at their leisure.

For example, Jarges completely disrupted the French class and started playing games with the female teacher and as a result, the teacher barely managed to teach the class the basic letter and number conversions, never mind the language.

But the real stinker was Ninth Grade Algebra. Ren needed the algebra to do the science, as he had planned on going to a college after high school to work within a field of science. Because of Jarges and the other "stooges", Ren and at least a dozen other students lost the opportunity to learn what was needed for them to become future scientists.

It happened like this. One day, no more than a week after the spring semester of 1973 had begun, Jarges and the two other stooges just suddenly stepped up from their desks in the 9th grade algebra class and walked out through the door and left the class. As they did so they said nothing to anyone, not even the teacher.

Apparently, because they took him by surprise and gave him no explanation for why they were leaving, the teacher excused himself from the class and decided to pursue them out into the hallway.

He never returned and when the bell rang at the top of the hour, everyone just got up and left and went to their next class, wondering what had become of them.

The next day they had the alegbra class, the teacher was there but the 3 stooges were not. No one bothered to say anything about them, and everyone just let the teacher direct the class, and he did so. But his direction was quite unexpected.

The teacher pulled out a box with a bunch of papers and started handing them out to all the students. On the papers were some algebraic equations which he had already taught them, which they were familiar with.

He told the class to work out the answers to all of the equations the way he had taught them (during the first week of class), and said he would leave the class and return at the end. The class had the entire hour period to work the equations out. It seemed simple enough so they did it.

What they didn't know at the time, however, was that the teacher was actually chasing the 3 stooges and getting high with them somewhere with higher ambitions than teaching a class of young fools how to do the basics of algebra they needed to work in a field of science.

They didn't know what was going on at the time because the man had them

fooled with the spread-sheets with all of those equations. That was what was so unexpected. He didn't just give them the equations to work on once or twice, he did it during every following class during the entire semester.

The class did nothing but those dang equations and somehow, before they realized what time it was, the semester was over.

Every class had two things, no..., make that 3 things in common. One, the teacher gave them the equations to do, two, he left the class and was oddly absent during most of the class, and three, the 3 stooges were nowhere to be seen, they had stopped wasting their time with the class completely.

Ah, but there was one exception that he recalled, when Jarges decided to actually visit the class. But this is where things got complicated.

The town was busy building a new school about 4 miles up the same street and they had the second level ready and they wanted to make the changeover that very spring. The new school combined 3 grades, 7th, 8th, and 9th, to take pressure off of the old high school with the grades 10th, 11th, and 12th. So they wanted to move the 9th grade to the new school, and that was the class of 1976, Ren's class.

They made the move mid-semester, in the first week of April, 1973. Once they had been moved into the new school, Jarges showed up during the first week, took a fantasy bite out of a cute young girl's ass, hung around to make time with her for the first week, and then made himself scarce again. It's almost certain

Jarges got the girl's attention, just as he had gotten the French teacher's attention, and half of all the pretty young girls in high school.

Jarges was, after all, a teenage gigolo who had cleverly had another spread the fact that he had a large penis all over town, so that he could mesmerize the girls and add dolls to the local club. It worked like a charm, as he acted like a Punk Prince Charming, and the new school suddenly became his favorite playground.

Shortly after the algebra class settled in to the new school, the familiar pattern returned, as the teacher handed out more papers with equations for the class to waste an hour with and then he left the class. The 3 stooges didn't hang around either and quietly, as the class became bored through the tedious hour doing the equations, the students quietly wondered what had become of them and the teacher again.

For 2 months the class did equations while the 3 stooges and the teacher were out somewhere, goofing off, getting high, and probably making plans for even bigger goof-offs, for all anybody knew. The simple fact was, once the class ended, nobody thought twice about it because everyone was too busy with other classes and their lives.

But Ren and his class knew nothing about what was really going on at the time. They didn't know the teacher was out getting high and goofing off with the 3 stooges and they didn't know the teacher was "faking it" with the equations, just to give them something to do and to buy time and get paid.

They didn't begin to realize something had gone wrong until the next year, in 10th grade, when none of the students in the "class of 76" had the prerequisite requirements to do the geometry that was expected of them. The geometry class was in the "old high school", in the fall semester of 1973.

Ren sat there next to one of his classmates, who was a good friend, and said to him, "Do you know what he's talking about?"

The young friend shook his head and said, "I can't figure it out," with obvious frustration.

By the middle of October, it was obvious to Ren that he couldn't do the geometry because he didn't have the algebra, but there was nothing he could do about it. He thought that it was just him and a couple of other friends who were having trouble, but he learned later that the whole class had done poorly.

It wasn't until after graduation, in 1976, after Ren and his classmates had all done poorly in the math and science classes with algebraic requirements, that he learned that the teacher had "faked" everything in the spring semester of 1973 and it was his final year teaching. Apparently, after that year, he went into another profession.

There was nothing that could be done about it. Ren actually found out about it in 1977, during his first year of technical college, after someone ed the word around the campus. One of the students had noticed how many students from their school and their class had failed "Finite Math" during the first semester of

technical college and had went digging and discovered the truth.

The word was ed but it was too late to do anything about it, unless somebody was willing to go back to the high school level and do 9th grade algebra all over again. The word was that the teacher had "faked" the class so he could the students and get paid, while he was out chasing boys with bones (the 3 stooges) and the skirts that so often flocked about them.

Ren and most of the students of his class lost the opportunity to work in the field of science and the ones who had nothing else going for them, including Ren, were forced to take work in the cheap hard labor fields or the military, etc... Ren himself flunked out of the second year of technical college because he couldn't handle the algebra-related science courses.

There he was, like the Refracted Man, 22 years later, in 1995, barely subsisting on a a lowly government stipend, going through a transition, and favoring the idea of going back to school while working with small-publishing.

He shook his head thinking about how wrong it all seemed that he should lose such an opportunity like that because of the 3 stooges and a distracted, negligent teacher. It wasn't just unethical; it was a civil violation of his rights!

Stone took note within his journal.

"As for 1974... that was the year in which my grades went down. I went from being an "A and B" grade student, to being a "B and C" grade student, all because of the lack of algebra, which directly disaffected all of my math and science courses.

"In retrospect, decades later, I realize now that step-brother's plans to make me look like "his stupid little brother" obviously was a major success. The sabotage of ninth-grade algebra not only made me look stupid, but it made the whole class of 76 look stupid also.

"If there is any way to legally prosecute step-brother for such a violation, I just might give it a try."

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Chapter Five: The Fool's Errand of 1975

Zek recalled when he was Ren in the summer of 1975.

He wrote in his journal.

"In the summer of 1975, while i was just getting to know a girl in town, stepbrother went behind my back, fed lies to our mother about the girl, and I was sent away on a fool's errand, to get me away from the girl. Mother didn't find out she had been "misinformed" about the girl until 7 years later, after I was involved in a motorcycle accident.

"It was too late, by that time, to prevent some kind of judgment ed upon me, and I was transferred away from the home-parallel, suffering memory-loss from the shock of the accident, without my knowledge."

Then he fell back, closed his eyes, and recalled it all.

It was May of 1975 and Ren had just met a young girl named Vesa Amberly...

Ren was 17 years old, in the eleventh grade, in the spring of 1975. Due to the somewhat elusive and mysterious "sabotage" of ninth-grade algebra, Ren's hopes for getting anywhere in the general field of science, with all of its practical

applications (mostly which depended upon algebra and calculus which Ren's class failed to receive), were much lower than before.

In reaction to his failings with math and science, he hoped to at least get a good job in a general maintenance field, and that was what he was looking at in 1975, alongside a good friend who had plans to start his own landscaping company. Leo Granger was Ren's best friend at the time and he wanted to start a landscaping company and wanted Ren to be his partner.

That was one of the reasons why Granger introduced Ren to Vesa Amberly, the younger sister of Lorie, the girl Leo was dating at the time. Granger knew Ren was young and strong and capable of doing the hard labor. The two had been friends for a few years, and worked on many hard labor jobs together, including work with a local landscaping company.

So, in 1975, with those plans in mind, Leo Granger and Ren Tenrut double-dated the two sisters, for about a month, every weekend, until June. In June, after school was out, Ren's step-brother Jarges suddenly intervened and ruined everything, by lying about Vesa to their mother and convincing her that Ren should be sent away to get him away from her.

Ren didn't know what Jarges had done at the time. He knew Jarges was jealous from the way he had reacted earlier in June, a week or 2 before Ren was sent away, but he had no idea that Jarges had gone behind his back, lied to their mother about Vesa, and led the mother to believe that Ren should be sent away to get him away from her.

Jarges had confronted Ren in the kitchen at the old house, a week or 2 before he was sent away. Jarges was obviously in a bad mood, apparently because he had no date that weekend. He confronted Ren with a prosecutor's accusatory attitude, the one which always made Ren feel guilty about something even when he was not.

He stopped Ren in the kitchen and demanded to know the name of the girl he was seeing. Ren refused to surrender the information because he did not trust Jarges and feared that the domineering, oppressive, jealous fool would ruin it for him.

Jarges hated him for not sharing the name of the girl he was seeing, and decided to ruin it for Ren anyhow, by simply making a "bad guess" of the name of the girl, in such a way, that he could use it against him.

Jarges went behind Ren's back and ed on "misinformation" to the mother, about the girl Ren was seeing, and that misinformation worked like a charm. No more than a week or two later, the mother insisted that Ren go away, in July (about a week later), to visit their oldest brother Derk, and his wife and baby, in Virginia.

He told her that he didn't want to go. He told her he wanted to stay and spend the summer with his friends. But she was quite insistent and dismissed the idea that he would prefer to stay there and spend time with his friends as if it were pointless. She insisted that Ren would have a much better time in Virginia and mentioned the ocean and the beaches, etc...

Ren didn't understand why she was so insistent about the whole idea at the time, but in retrospect, decades later, he had a much better idea about what had happened. Apparently, she had been seriously worried that the girl Ren was seeing would corrupt him, because she had been misinformed about the girl by Jarges.

Apparently, Jarges was capable of lying to her and she actually believed him because he was "trusted" to be truthful with her, because the "senior" Jarges expected it of her.

In point of fact, the reason why Jarges was able to get away with such evil acts to begin with was because he was "trusted" completely by the "senior" Jarges, and that trust was blindly accepted because the senior Jarges favored his "junior name-sake", and wanted him to be the next playboy millionaire, even if it meant sacrificing Ren in the process. The mother, in turn, was led to trust the little liar's word, because the senior Jarges expected it of her.

Now, from everything that Zek Stone had gathered, over the decades, about the secret, sordid past activities of Jarges, after recovering all of the details from the memories lost by Ren after the accident in late 1982, he was able to reconstruct a general picture of what Jarges had done at the time.

After Ren refused to tell Jarges the name of the girl he was seeing, Jarges apparently decided to make a "bad guess" from what he already knew. What he aleady knew, apparently, was Ren was seeing one of the Amberly sisters, he just didn't know which one, because there were so many. There were 4 different sisters, aside from Lorie, the sister whom Leo Granger was seeing.

But the problem was not with the numbers. Jarges was interested in Lucinda, a ravishing young brunette whom he secretly wanted for himself. Jarges was busy working when he found out about the fact that Ren was seeing one of the Amberly sisters, and he feared that it was Lucinda. That was the reason for the confrontation in the kitchen, shortly before Ren was sent away.

After Ren refused to tell Jarges the name of the girl he was seeing, Jarges made a "bad guess" that it was Lucinda, because he wanted her so badly, he was willing to take the chance. So he went to the senior Jarges and told the old man about it, and the senior Jarges agreed to help him, to give him all the he needed.

The "junior" Jarges may have had to lie a little to convince the old man to back him up, but it didn't take too much convincing usually, because the step-father, the "senior" Jarges, was already convinced that Ren was a bastard, because his hair was brunette, not blond, like all the other males of the family.

In any case, the junior Jarges ed on his "bad guess" to the senior "father" and the mother, and they were both led to believe that Ren was seeing Lucinda, the ravishing young brunette, who also had a "bad reputation". Lucinda was older than Vesa and had the kind of bad reputation that conservative Catholic mothers feared would corrupt their young sons and get them in all kinds of trouble.

Now, in Jarges mind, he obviously thought that Lucinda was perfect for him, because he was such a Prince Charming with the ladies and a well-endowed stud capable of playing boyfriend to such a ravishing young sex-doll as Lucinda. In his mind, he thought Ren didn't deserve her, and used his "bad guess" to prevent

Ren from taking her from him, by convincing their mother that Ren should be sent away on a fool's errand just to get him away from her.

In fact, the mother confessed to the latter part of this picture after Ren's accident in late 1982, while he was in a leg-cast and on codeine for the pain. She confessed that she made a "mistake" in the summer of 1975, when she intentionally sent him away to Virginia, to get him away from "Lucinda".

She confessed that she made the mistake of acting on the idea that he was seeing "Lucinda", not "Vesa", and that she was afraid that "Lucinda" would corrupt him. Later, after Ren recovered the details of his memory, many years later, in the early 1990s, he was able to put it all together and see what had happened.

It became evident that Jarges had been the source of the "misinformation" which led their mother to think that Ren was seeing Lucinda, not Vesa, and it was therefore the fault of Jarges that he had been sent away in the summer of 1975, and lost Vesa, not the fault of either the mother or Ren.

Jarges had lied to the parents, in the summer of 1975, about the girl Ren was seeing at that time, and Ren had been sent on a fool's errand to get him away from her, and he had lost Vesa and an opportunity for a healthy, well-balanced life in suburban paradise.

In other words, Jarges had killed Ren with a lie.

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Zek recalled the last week in June of 1975, after he had been coerced into going away on the fool's errand, under pressure from the step-father, step-brother, and the mother.

He was taking the bus over Chesapeake Bay, crossing over one of the biggest, highest, longest bridges he had ever traveled over, when he realized he was at the "point of no return", and felt he had made the biggest mistake in his life.

Once across that bay, there was just no turning back. He felt like he had made such a big mistake, that he was willing to get out right there on the bridge and walk back, but it was too late, and his heart sunk with deep regret.

He thought about Vesa and felt he had lost her, because there was no way back, and he feared she wouldn't wait all summer for him. Why should she?

They never even got to first base. There was no reason for her to assume that she should have to wait for Ren to return. He had no reason to think she wouldn't just forget all about him that summer and get involved with another guy.

He felt he had lost her for sure, that he had made a terrible mistake, and he was depressed about it all summer long.

Zek recalled the time, thought about Vesa, and closed his eyes.

She was just a distant memory now, but there was one time at the lake, one memory he could never forget. He thought about it and tried to visualize it in his mind.

They had just arrived at the lake-side. Ren, Vesa, Leo, and Lorie were all there on that day, and it was a beautiful day in early June.

There was some kind of water-facility with a classical stone front, at the base of a hillside, just below a land-bridge with a roadway on top of it. There was a nicely kept lawn and bushes about the stone structure, a sidewalk with a few benches, and some flowers.

To the left of the lawn was a gentle slope that led to the edge of the lake.

Zek could still see Vesa, in his mind, smiling at him and leading him down the gentle slope, to the grassy knoll outside the structure. He caught up to her on the grass and stood beside her as they looked out upon the wide lake.

It was a memory he could never forget. It was the last time they spent together

before he was sent away on the fool's errand and lost her.

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Ren didn't want to go away that summer. It was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. He didn't want to leave Vesa and his other friends, he wanted to stay and spend the summer with them. His mother was quite insistent and eventually, he gave into her, but he didn't really want to go and regretted it forever after.

Ren hated himself for leaving Vesa that summer. It was the biggest mistake he had ever made in his so-called life. It was a terrible loss for him. It left him feeling like one of the biggest fools in the world. He hated himself for it, and his heart was bleeding for years after. Not only did he lose Vesa, he lost an opportunity for a normal, healthy, well-balanced life in suburban paradise.

At the time, he didn't know that the step-brother had "misinformed" the mother about Vesa. He suspected Jarges had something to do with it, but had no substantial proof that the step-brother couldn't simply deny and get away with, as he always did with such violations upon Ren's rights.

Ren had nothing substantial to pin on Jarges, so he had nothing he could use against him, and nothing to "exonerate" himself from the sheer stupidity of the mistake, which fell upon his shoulders.

He didn't find out about the "mistake" the mother had made until 7 years later, after an accident in late 1982, and by then, it was too late to undo the damages done by the "fool's errand of 1975".

He had lost Vesa, an adorable young brunette whom he thought he may have been in love with at the time, and he had lost a good friend along with an opportunity for a good job and a healthy, well-balanced life in suburban paradise.

He had lost one of the most common and basic dreams that every young American was willing to work for and there was nothing he could do to change that fact, because it was 7 years too late and the judgment ed upon him left him demoted, outcast, and kicked out into the cold, at the end of the bread-line, with nothing but the shirt on his back, by 1984.

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Chapter Six: 1976: The Odd Man Out

Zek recalled when he was Ren in 1976, when he graduated from high school.

All during the twelfth grade of high school, Ren was heart-broken, confused, and mad, but he did his best to hide it within social situations, such as school, because it was expected of him. Showing ones emotions about anything was more of a private matter, than social, so Ren played the role as well as he could, in spite of everything.

After losing Leo Granger as a friend, due to the fool's errand in 75, Ren was on his own until the spring of 76. He experienced a depression, due to the loss of Vesa, all through the twelfth grade, from autumn of 75 to spring of 76.

Ren managed to get along without too much of a problem, aside from the depression, which never seemed to go away, in spite of his best efforts.

The twelfth grade was somewhat of a disappointment, due to his failures at almost every algebra-related subject in science he had that year.

Not only had he failed with Vesa, but because of the failures at algebra-related classes such as physics and chemistry, Ren didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell at getting anywhere in the field of science after graduation.

Whether or not Ren or any of the others of his class realized it at the time, they were all victims of grade-fixing, negligence, and certain bad ethical violations by bad people.

One of those bad people was his very own step-brother, Jarges, who had somehow managed to distract the algebra teacher away from the class, with the help of 2 other "stooges", in 1973. The teacher had "faked" his way through the class just before quitting the position and going into some other line of work.

As a result of the step-brother's distraction and the teacher's negligence, the entire class failed to learn what it needed to learn to do the algebra-related classes that followed, and everyone in the class did very poorly with those subjects.

Physics and Chemistry were impossible to do without the algebra that his class had failed to learn because of the teacher's negligence in 1973.

The side effects included a mutual misunderstanding of algebra between several of the male of the class who turned to each other over and over, shook their heads, and said, "Do you have any idea what this is all about?", only to recieve a vague, confused response like, "It's beyond me, I can't figure it out."

Along with this, Ren experienced other problems as well.

One interesting problem that occurred in gym class that year. A guy who didn't like Ren for some reason, he didn't know why exactly, whipped the ball directly at him during a game of "dodge-ball" or something, and hit Ren really hard in the chest, and Ren just stood there like a statue and acted like nothing had happened.

The guy looked at him with surprise, for a second, and the game continued.

But later, Ren simply got sick of playing, stepped away from the court, and slipped out, without anyone noticing. He really wasn't in the mood to play silly ball-games. He went to his locker, got back into his regular clothes, and left.

It was one of the strangest days at school he had ever experienced. He got sick of playing games at the gymnasium, and decided to just walk out and quit the rest of the class. Later, as he was sitting outside the gym, reading a science-fiction book on a bench, one of the gym coaches stepped out into the hallway, saw him, stepped over, and they had a short chat.

The guy asked him what the book was about and if it was any good. Ren recalled it. It was "A Fall of Moon Dust", by Arthur C. Clarke, a story about a Moon shuttle on the Moon that had been in an accident and was trapped beneath a deep crater full of dust.

Ren chatted with him about it for a moment and then the guy left him. Apparently, he just wanted to see if Ren was okay. He didn't tell Ren to go back to class, he just let him be. He may have figured Ren had the wind knocked out of him or something, from getting hit by the ball like that.

Ren resented the bullies at the gym, didn't care for wasting time playing games with them. After that day, he decided to quit gym-class altogether, and started to wander about and do other things. He spent one day away from gym-class checking out areas of the high school which he had never ventured into before.

It was one of the strangest experiences he'd ever had. It was an experience that became a part of a repeating dream, later, after graduation, in which he found himself wandering about the corridors of various schools and colleges, almost as if a part of him had become lost there and couldn't quite escape it.

But by far the most memorable moment for Ren was the very last day of school, when the class graduated. It wasn't the kind of memory one would expect to have about graduation day from high school. It was sad and melancholy, and also somewhat of a surprise, at least for Ren.

Regular classes were canceled in the afternoon for the 12th grade, because it was the last day and they were graduating. There was a movie being played, in the amphitheater, for anyone who wanted to watch it, but it was optional and nobody forced anyone to do it.

It turned out to be Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew". Ren sat and watched as

some big gigolo wrestled some bitch into the hay, and as the guy had his way with the "Taming of the Shrew", Ren lost interest, stepped up, and left the movie.

All he could think of was how he had made the biggest mistake ever in 1975, when he left Vesa, and had no date for the prom. He didn't care to watch some other guy hog all the glory.

So Ren stepped outside, near the end of the day, and sat outside on the benches overlooking the circular driveway where the buses came and went, and the valley just beyond it. From there, one could see down-slope into the valley and the town, for miles.

A couple of his classmates ed him and they talked. They talked about what was next, and someone mentioned the graduation prom.

Ren didn't have a date to the prom and was too depressed to go. For some reason, he expected that at least one of his classmates would also be alone and without a date, but he was wrong. As it turned out, all of his classmates had dates to the prom, much to his surprise. He was the only one who didn't have a date to the prom.

Ren Tenrut was the odd man out, the only member of his class that didn't have a date to the graduation prom. After he learned this fact, he thought of Vesa, became quietly depressed, and decided to "walk" all the way home from school, even though it was about 10 miles.

He hated himself for leaving Vesa in the summer of 1975. If he hadn't made that mistake, he probably would have had her as a date to the prom.

It was one of the most depressing days of his life. He never felt so alone in the world as he felt at that time.

It was the longest walk home he had ever taken in his so-called life.

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Chapter Seven: The Phony Photo-Ops of 1977

When Zek Stone thought back to 1977, the year after graduation from high school, the memories he recovered that reflected directly upon his relations with his step-brother were most prominent.

The year was 1977 and Jarges was into doing photo-ops to prove to everyone what a good brother he was to his stupid little brother Ren.

It was the year that the step-brother "pretended" to be a "good brother" to Ren, by using him as a driver and doing phony photo-ops in front of people, which led everyone to believe that he really was a "good brother" after all.

Little did Ren know at the time, but Jarges was setting him up for the kill. By doing phony photo-ops in front of people, he was able to fool them all into believing he really was a "good brother", in spite of every evil thing he had done to Ren in the past.

Unfortunately, Ren didn't see what was coming, and Jarges had him "gagged" with a threat upon his life (see ch. 4), which kept Ren from sharing all of the dirty details about how evil his step-brother really was.

In retrospect, Ren wished he had been able to "ungag" himself from stepbrother's threat upon his life and spoken out to others about what Jarges had done to him, but whenever he had done so in the past, the step-brother had

always denied everything and made Ren out to be a liar.

Because so much of it was merely Ren's word against the word of Jarges, without any substantial evidence to prove anything, Jarges always won such arguments, with the of the senior Jarges, and Ren always lost.

If only Ren had seen it coming, if only he had known what Jarges had planned, he might have decided to spill his guts and tell all to the others, to his friends and the friends of Jarges also. If he had done so, rather than thinking he could buy time, things might have gone differently.

But Jarges had Ren gagged with a threat and he couldn't get over the fear of Jarges actually having the power to kill him and get away with it. With the senior Jarges's , Ren knew Jarges could do it and get away with it. The old man always took his junior name-sake's side with everything.

Jarges could talk about Ren all he wanted, behind his back, and make him out to be anything at all just by lying well, but poor Ren couldn't say anything at all about Jarges because he had Ren "gagged" with a threat upon his life.

Ren took the threat seriously, said nothing about all the evil things Jarges had done, and hoped to be able to buy enough time to find a good job and get away from Jarges.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way, because Jarges never warned him about any of his secret plans, and Ren didn't see it coming.

In the summer of 1977, sometime in June, Jarges approached Ren with what seemed like some kind of act of truce between them. To Jarges, it was more like a "favor" he wanted from Ren, and Ren knew that he couldn't refuse. Ren knew at the time that if he refused to to go along with the "favor", that Jarges wouldn't permit it, and ultimately, Ren would be forced to go along with him whether he liked it or not.

Ren knew from experience in the past that Jarges always got what he wanted from Ren, and if Ren didn't play along, Jarges would hurt him for it. Rather than suffer the punishment of Jarges, which could make things quite a bit more difficult than they already were, Ren agreed to play along with Jarges.

In retrospect, he realized it was fear that forced him to comply with Jarges, but at the time, it was like he simply had no choice in the matter and knew that he had to comply with Jarges wishes or the spoiled brat fascist control freak would have put him through hell.

So, when Jarges needed a driver one weekend in June of 1977, Ren had no choice but to play the "driver" for him (and his friends). At the time, Jarges didn't have a license to drive and needed a driver to drive him and his friends to a local club on Saturday night. Ren was chosen for the job. To avoid any more problems with Jarges, Ren agreed to be the driver.

Jarges sat in the seat beside him and told him where to go. Before going to the

club, they had to go around town and pick up all of his friends. Some of the friends were already in the area, but one was about 10 miles to the northwest, in the opposite direction of the city, where the night-club was located.

So Ren drove them to the somewhat rural setting, near the farmlands, where a whole bunch of newly modern middle-middle and upper-middle class homes had recently been constructed, as the suburban sprawl was spreading into the boondocks. They drove into the driveway of a new modern, middle-middle class home, just as the sun was setting on the horizon.

Whoever this friend of Jarges was, the home he was living in appeared to be far superior to anything Ren had ever visited before. But he didn't go inside. He sat in the car in the driveway and Jarges honked the horn twice, and they waited. About a minute later, the guy stepped out and ed them.

It was a friend of Jarges that he didn't know very well, Rex, one of the older guys that Jarges had hung out with for years, but Ren was not too familiar with. Ren kept his mouth shut and let Jarges play the navigator while giving him directions.

After they picked up Rex, they had to pick up his girlfriend, who was an exotic dancer at the club they were going to. Once they had picked her up, they headed for the big city and the exotic dancer club.

Ren was a common, young, normal male like any other and he liked girls. He liked the idea of checking out the exotic dancers at the club, so ultimately, he

didn't hold it against Jarges for hijacking his weekend so he could drive Jarges and his friends to the club.

But the truth of the matter was, he missed Vesa and would have preferred to spend his weekends with her, if he hadn't lost her because of the fool's errand in the summer of 75.

When Jarges began using Ren as driver for him and his friends, it was almost as if Ren were nothing more than a hired-hand. Jarges had learned how to control Ren like a robot over the past few years, after proving how easy it was for him to hurt Ren and get away with it. There really was nothing Ren could do about it, he knew, so he played along with Jarges to avoid facing his wrath.

What Ren didn't understand, however, was that Jarges was actually doing more than just using Ren as a driver or for whatever, because he was the master and Ren was the subordinate slave. Ren didn't see it at the time, but Jarges was actually staging public "photo-ops", which showed others what a "good brother" Jarges was to Ren.

What a major fiasco and a lousy joke it was on Ren, for Jarges to "pretend" he was a "good brother" to Ren after doing so many evil things to hurt him, and lead everyone to believe that he really was such a "good brother", when in fact, he was not.

Jarges was a lying, spoiled brat, fascist control-freak who had to have everything his way and forced Ren to go along with him on everything, whether he liked it

or not, even if it hurt Ren in the process.

All the lying fascist pig had to do was deny it all after the fact and he always got away with it because he was the favorite "junior" name-sake to the "senior" Jarges, and the old man always let him have his way with everything.

In fact, for Ren, it was just like being in a level of hell, with the spoiled-brat son of Satan using Ren like some kind of pet or toy robot which he was able to whip all he wanted while the senior Satan watched on with amusement, completely careless of the suffering and pain Ren was forced to endure.

It was quite beyond Ren at the time it was all happening. He didn't know that Jarges was intentionally spending time with him just to stage "photo-ops" in front of people who "witnessed" how "good" a brother Jarges was to Ren.

He didn't know it at the time, but Jarges, the son of Satan, was setting him up for the kill.

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Zek Stone recalled the time-period in his journal:

"Whether I realized it or not at the time, I was already a victim of two evil gaslighters, the two Jarges, senior and junior, who were working together to make Jarges junior into the favorite son of the family while making me into a "stupid little brother", a fall-guy, scapegoat, and fool to take the fall.

"They had big plans for me. They planned on using me as a sacrifice, to take the fall for the spoiled-brat pig of a step-brother, Jarges, aka "the son of Satan", the biggest pathological liar I have ever known in my existence.

"At the time, I knew step-brother had lied and gotten away with it, and i also knew that the two of them had something going, and the step-father obviously favored him, but i didn't understand that I was being "gas-lighted" into submission, every time the step-brother practiced his evil arts on me, denied it and covered it up after the fact, and got away with it, with the complete of the step-father.

"If i had known about "gas-lighting" at the time, I might have been motivated to report it to higher authorities. But i knew nothing about "gas-lighting" and furthermore, I'm not even sure the step-brother knew anything about the longterm effects, which had been reported from previous cases.

"The bottom-line on this is that whether or not the step-father or the step-broher knew it, the long-term effects of gas-lighting could actually result in schizophrenic refractions. Victims of gas-lighting, in other words, have actually been known to lose their minds, to some extent, if they suffered too much for too long under the abusive violations of gas-lighters.

"Step-brother was in complete denial of his violations upon me. He had learned to lie so well to the parents about his treatment of me, that he could give me a bloody nose, blame it on my own stupidity and clumsiness, and they would have believed him.

"That's exactly how it was with them. It was if they both believed every thing Jarges junior said about me as a rule, and never believed anything I said in my defense. In this way, not only did he have his way with everything, he made me out to be the liar, whose word could not be trusted.

"I have analyzed the step-brother's gas-lighting powers and wondered how he could be so sadistic towards me and lacking in conscience, and I traced the attitude way back to a time when we were still very young, when step-brother was an obvious sibling-rival who hated me and constantly fought me for favoritism with the mother and sisters. He hated me all the time and wanted everyone else in the family to take sides with him against me.

"One day, I recall the first time we were doing something outside in the backyard, and the step-father got mad at me for a minute and called me stupid, made me feel foolish, right in front of the step-brother. It really wasn't that big a deal, but the step-father wasn't in too good a mood that day or something and took it out on me rather harshly.

"Well, I recall the look of glee and satisfaction on my step-brother's face that day. It became quite common, every time the step-father was around and either one of them made me look and feel "stupid". What occurred after that was a kind of mutual bonding between the step-father and the step-brother (senior and junior), in which both of them made me feel stupid all the time, in just about

every thing I did.

"But it was mostly the step-brother who instigated it. Apparently, after that first day in which I was scolded by the old man, step-brother decided that the old man hated me just as much as he did, and started feeding the old guy all kinds of excuses for whipping me. He began lying about me quite regularly, to turn the old man against me, and the old man eventually just gave him the whip and let him use it on me, at his sadistic heart's delight.

"It was as if Jarges junior had agreed with the old man, who treated me like a bastard, and proceeded to feed the old guy excuses for punishing me and favoring him. All the junior Jarges had to do was lie well to the old man, and he was able to have everything his way.

"After all, the senior Jarges had big plans for his junior prince-gigolo. He wanted Jarges junior to be the next millionaire playboy on the block, and he didn't care if they had to sacrifice me to make that happen."

"Step-brother was a pathological liar who, with the complete of the stepfather (his senior name-sake), was able to lie so well about me, over the years of gas-lighting violations and denial, that by the time I had graduated from high school he had everyone convinced that I was some kind of "gay weak-link and masochist" who was too stupid to go to college and deserved nothing less than extreme hard labor in the field, for peanuts.

"Hard labor wasn't the problem actually, until the step-brother ruined it all for me

in the summer of 1975. I had no problem doing a hard labor job, I had worked on farms, grounds-keeping, and landscaping, to name a few. But after everything I had done, in spite of my failures with algebra and science, I don't think it was fair for them to send me away at that time, in the summer of 1975.

"Of course, I know now, from the facts I have put together, after recovering the details of my memory from before the accident in late 82, that it was completely unfair, and that Jarges junior had to lie to our mother, to actually on misinformation about the girl I was seeing at the time, to get me sent on that fool's errand and get me away from her.

"I know now about the two gas-lighters who did this to me and I have to protest against being violated by anyone in such a way.

"It is important for humanity to understand how wrong "gas-lighting" violations are. Humans have rights, but apparently, gas-lighters have been known to violate those rights. My step-father and step-brother were both gas-lighters who gaslighted me for the first 20 years of my previous life."

"I am a victim of gas-lighting fascists."

2021-06-25

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Chapter Eight: The Naked Club of 1978: How I was Kicked Out of Suburban Paradise

Ren went along with Jarges when he wanted him to do things with him because he didn't want Jarges to punish him and wanted to buy time to find a good job and get away from the fascist control-freak. He never expected Jarges to make matters worse than they already were.

But when Jarges wanted Ren to "get naked" with him and his friends, in the summer of 1978, Ren had to draw the line there because he simply didn't want to get naked with someone he didn't really trust that much.

In the summer of 1978, Ren was already a victim of the evil step-brother's lies, but could do nothing about it but buy time and hope things didn't get any worse. He had plans to eventually get a better job and a way to get more money, but he had been set back by the mistake he made in the summer of 1975 and was suffering from complications.

He had no idea that his step-brother had secret plans to use him, plans he had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about.

Jarges was a big liar who had actually managed to succeed at the "gas-lighting" of his younger brother Ren. Over the years, Jarges had managed to lie his way out of things and Ren was the one who was used as his favorite scapegoat almost every time.

His secret power was simple: The step-father, the senior Jarges, hated Ren like a

bastard and believed everything the "junior" Jarges said about Ren. As long as there were no witnesses to testify against him, Jarges had found that he could lie about Ren and make him take the blame for almost anything.

In this way, Ren was "gas-lighted" into submission beneath the power of the two Jarges, through a continual, repeating process by which the junior Jarges violated Ren's rights, denied it after the fact, got the senior Jarges to take sides with him, and made Ren out to be a liar.

In this way, Jarges turned the whole family, starting with the mother, then the oldest brother, and the two sisters, against him, as they were all forced to take sides with the "Patriarch" of the family, the senior Jarges, who always took sides with his junior name-sake.

So, by the summer of 1978, the lies and gas-lighting instigated by Jarges upon Ren had victimized him. The damages had been done, and Ren could do nothing about it. What Ren failed to realize, because he knew within his own mind, that he was innocent, was that Jarges had managed to make the whole family look at Ren as if he, alone, were guilty.

Whether he realized it or not at the time, the step-brother had quite successfully managed to deflect any responsibility for any of the damages done to Ren, and led the whole family to believe that Ren was simply "too stupid" to do what was right.

At the same time, Jarges had turned to playing the phony "good Christian

brother" to do some photo-ops with Ren, in front of the sisters and general public, to convince everyone at that time that he was nothing but a "good" brother to Ren, and would never do anything to hurt him.

At the very same time he was doing the phony photo-ops to fool everyone, he was hiding a deep, dark secret about how he had lied to their mother in the summer of 1975 to get Ren away from the girl he was seeing at the time, and Ren had lost the girl and an opportunity at a better life in "suburban paradise".

No one knew anything about what Jarges had done, at the time, in the summer of 1978, when Jarges was planning on "using" Ren again for one of his selfish schemes. Jarges had kept Ren "gagged" for years to prevent him from talking about anything Jarges did.

Ren knew Jarges had done "something" but he couldn't prove anything substantial and Jarges had a history of complete denial which always worked, in spite of the fact that he was lying most of the time.

So at the time, in the summer of 1978, Ren was buying time while doing a little detective work, and looking for the girl he had lost, whom he had become obsessed with and wanted a chance to apologize to her for his mistakes.

Somehow, because of the fool's errand he was sent on, he had completely lost the girl and had no idea what happened to her. He was very confused and didn't quite know what to do about it. He was a romantic fool with a bleeding heart, but he was on the edge of madness.

He hated himself for the mistake he had made, and hated his step-brother for having something to do with it (that he couldn't prove), and he was keeping it all bottled up inside because nobody in the world cared.

His own mother appeared to not even notice how much he was suffering, and up until the summer of 1975, he had thought she was the only one in the family who did care. After 75, it was as if nobody cared and he was completely alone in the world.

The step-brother Jarges was the real problem. He hated Ren the day he was born and started telling lies about him the day after. Jarges had lied about him so much over the years and made him look so bad, it was as if he had successfully convinced everyone in the world that Ren was a hopeless, stupid little brother who could never amount to anything.

In retrospect, Ren realized that Jarges had successfully destroyed him with a campaign of lies, gas-lighting, and psychological warfare. But at the time it was happening, Ren couldn't see the forest for the trees on any of it. At the time, he was nothing more than a helpless victim to his step-brother's evil manipulations.

It was in the summer of 1978 that Jarges was approached one day by the other of the "Naked Club", a loosely allied group of young people in town who had all become involved in "naked activities" for the fun of it on their freetime, and the summer was their favorite time for it.

Ren knew nothing about the club because Jarges had successfully kept him out of it. But in the summer of 1978, the times were changing and the "Naked Club" had actually become something that had become so popular in town that there was simply no way to keep Ren out of it forever.

It was the summer of 1978, after the Vietnam war had turned the vast majority of humans in the world off of the idea that war and violence were any kind of solution to the world's problems, and everyone was interested in trying almost anything else.

Ren didn't know what was developing behind the scenes at the time, not even in his own little town. Jarges, playing the benevolent "big-brother" to him, managed to limit Ren's intelligence so well that he was able to make him look like a "stupid little brother" as often as he felt like it.

For example, the "Naked Club" was actually formed in 1977, the year before the summer of 78, and Jarges managed to keep him out of it the whole time. The first time Ren recalled, from a memory he recovered only recently, was a time Ren was invited to a "naked party" at the local apartment complex where such parties had become regular past-times. The step-brother got in his way at the time and somehow managed to talk him out of it.

Jarges made the party sound like something he wouldn't be interested in or something that would get him in trouble or something. Jarges had a way of controlling Ren at that time just by interfering and playing the "big-brother" who cared about him. When it came to girls and sex, step-brother had a way of

pretending to be a "good Christian" brother and channeling the "care" that their mother smothered Ren with, and using it against Ren to keep him from having fun.

In such ways, the step-brother was actually able to "fool" Ren into siding with "caution" if he didn't want to share something or somebody, with Ren. In this way, he was able to keep Ren from actively becoming a member of the "Naked Club". But in the summer of 1978, the local group of tried to get Jarges to let Ren into the club.

Jarges was devious. He told Ren absolutely nothing about the "Naked Club" and warned the others that Ren was somewhat "slow" and "stupid" and might not want to be a part of their club. They planned to get together for a meeting with Ren and planned on inviting him in.

So they all met one day at the house of Jarges and Ren. There were about 8 all total, including 3 friends of Jarges and 3 friends of Ren. The only one who knew nothing about the "Naked Club" was Ren. Everyone else there knew something about it, even Ren's friends. They had found out but they either didn't know enough to talk about it or promised the others not to talk about it with anyone without permission.

The simple fact was, at that time, in the summer of 1978, out of all the people present at that meeting, Ren was the only one who was still what was considered a "virgin", because he had no girlfriend and never had sex with anyone.

Jarges didn't care. Jarges didn't want Ren to "share" the "love", because he secretly hated him and wanted him to just disappear and be gone.

But Jarges could not it how he felt about Ren and learned to hide it very well. Then, in the summer of 1978, he saw an opportunity to prevent Ren from taking any more of "his" reality from him.

After talking to the others and insisting Ren was "too stupid" to be a member of the "Naked Club", he decided that they should "put him to a test" to see if he was "smart" enough to be a member.

The others agreed to go along with Jarges and on that day, as they were all hanging out in the kitchen at the house, while the parents were away on vacation, Jarges put Ren to the "test", to see if he was "smart" enough to be a part of their "Naked Club".

Jarges asked the question to Ren: "Ren, what do you think about getting naked and running about in the nude?"

Ren suspected immediately that Jarges was trying to trick him into something to make him look like a fool. He didn't trust Jarges and wasn't about to let himself be made to look like a fool by the lying fascist again.

Jarges had managed to lie to have everything his way and Ren couldn't do anything about it because the "senior' Jarges always took sides with him. Ren was forced to go along with the "junior" Jarges on everything, whether he liked it or not.

Jarges was the master and Ren was the servant and slave, constantly forced to go along with Jarges on everything, or else suffer the consequences. Ren knew that he had to go along with all of the phony photo-ops when they happened, otherwise Jarges would have tortured him for it and got away with the torture as well, just by denying it and getting the of the step-father.

But when Jarges started asking such blatantly devious questions which treated Ren like he was nothing more than a toy robot that he could get to do anything at all, including getting naked just like that, Ren had to draw the line and set some limits. He simply did not trust Jarges like that.

At the time he rejected the notion of "getting naked", he simply didn't trust the messenger, and given the history of Jarges's lies and gas-lighting over the years, there really was no reason for him to cross that line.

But it had all been another devious trick to make Ren look "stupid".

Zek Stone recalled the time and recorded within his journal.

"In the summer of 1978, I was working on a problem. I was much too busy worrying about the problem to suddenly "get naked" with my step-brother and his friends. Furthermore, I could not talk about the problem with the step-brother and his friends, because the step-brother had me gagged with a threat, to prevent me from talking about him to other people.

"Yes, that is correct. Some time before 1978, in the early 70s, my step-brother gagged me with a threat upon my life which prevented me from talking about him and the things he did, to other people. The gag was put on me after I casually shared a funny anecdote about something the step-brother had done "out there", about town, with our parents.

"As it turned out, it was something he didn't want them to know about, so he denied it completely and made me out to be a liar, and got away with it. A minute or two later, he gagged me when we were "upstairs", just outside the bedroom. He forced me up against the wall, with his hands around my throat, and told me if I ever talked about him like that again, he would kill me.

"I took the "gag threat" seriously because I believed my step-brother really could have killed me and got away with it, because the step-father always backed him up on his lies. He could have merely made it look like an accident, blamed it on my stupidity, and the step-father would have gone along with it. The mother and family would have followed the step-father's direction, just as they always did, whenever the step-brother lied.

"He always had his way, even if he had to lie to get it. So I believed him when he said he would kill me if I talked about him like that again, with anyone.

"So, in the summer of 1978, when the step-brother wanted me to "get naked" with him and his friends, and I declined, I could not even talk about the "problem" I had in front of them, so I chose to brush the whole idea aside as a matter of choice at the time. I was prevented from talking about the problem with anyone, because the problem concerned the step-brother.

"He had lied so many times and had his way with everything, hurting me in the process, that I could not trust him. I also suspected that he had something to do with the "fool's errand" I had been sent on in the summer of 1975, but I had no substantial proof that I could use against him, and I knew he would simply deny it, just as he always did, and get away with it.

"So long as it was just my word against his, and i couldn't prove he was lying, he always won that argument and got away with it, because he had something I didn't have: the step-father's .

"But honestly, I had no idea that my declination to get naked on that day in the summer of 1978 would make my situation worse than it already was. I truly did not see that coming. I suppose my step-brother would have simply said it was because I was "stupid".

"If I was "stupid" on that day, it was because I was a victim of 20 years of gaslighting and lies, all under the direction of a lying fascist-pig and son of Satan who hated me the day i was born and started telling lies about me the day after.

"What went wrong after that was based upon the misunderstanding caused by my reaction to the invitation to go naked with step-brother and his friends. Everyone was led to assume that I "never" wanted to go naked ever, just because I didn't want to go naked on that fatal day. The truth was i just didn't want to go naked with my step-brother at the time, for reasons which I have pointed out within my defense report.

"Furthermore, many were led to falsely believe that i was opposed to their right to go naked on their free-time. That was a lie, perpetuated by step-brother and the kissing cousin who witnessed the event on that fatal day in the summer of 1978.

"I was and am a victim of a pathological liar and a gas-lighter who put a "gagthreat" upon my life, to keep me from talking to anyone about him, and they did not know it at the time."

"I did not expect to be completely rejected by everyone after that fatal day in the summer of 1978."

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Later in 1978

Zek Stone recalled an incident in the late summer of 1978, after his declination to "go naked" with the step-brother and friends. He didn't know it at the time, but in retrospect, 40 years later, realized it for what it was: a practical joke.

Appx: 1978-08-11

Ren was approached by his step-brother Jarges and 2 other stooges from the Catch-22 club, on a weekend, in the early evening, just after sunset. One was a guy from a mile up the street where Ren lived, the other was the guy who had the girlfriend who was an exotic dancer, Rex, whom he had played "driver" for in 77.

The guy from up the street stared into Ren's eyes and spoke to him with complete sincerity.

"Hey Ren," he said, with an evil grin, "we're going to a party in Longmeadow. It's a private party at a house, with just girls. These are girls that want to have fun, Ren. You can come along with us, if you want."

Ren had no other plans that weekend and he was basically just as normal as any young man his age, and when he recieved an invitation like that from someone he thought to be a friend, there was no reason for him to think it wasn't the genuine article. He agreed to go along with the 3 guys and they drove in a car across the bridge, over the river, to Longmeadow, about 10 kilometers away.

They drove to the right, on the other side of the bridge, and took the long highway ramp up a gradual slope and around a long curve. They drove up the hillside, at the edge of the river, and followed the bottleneck between the riverside and a local park. There was a wide field and a baseball diamond, on the left, as they drove up the gradual hillside, into the town of Longmeadow.

A thick woodland of trees appeared on the right, as they entered the residential area, with many houses on the left. They drove for less than a minute and the thick woodland thinned out on the right and more houses appeared there.

The house they were heading to was just inside the town-line, not more than a couple of hundred meters from the baseball diamond and the park. They drove for less than a minute, then took a right, followed a side-street shortly, and stopped out in front of a large, middle middle-class house.

Ren followed the other 3 guys to the front door and one after the other, they were let into the house. But when Ren reached the doorway, the girl that was standing there stopped him, with a frown, and said, "Sorry, there's no room for you!", and slammed the door in his face.

Ren was shocked and disappointed as he walked away. He had no "ride" home because he had been driven there by the other guys in one of their cars, so he had to walk all the way. He was confused about being rejected by the girl and did not understand exactly why she had done it.

As he walked home that night, he forgot about the incident as his thoughts

returned to Vesa and the fool's errand of 1975. It was the biggest mistake he had ever made in his life and he forever regretted it. Because his step-brother could not be directly connected to the mistake at the time, Ren merely blamed himself for being "stupid", which was exactly what his step-brother had been saying about him all along.

Ren hated himself for making that mistake. He hated himself to no end, as his heart bled, and beneath a deep depression, a confused madness grew. Ren knew his step-brother had done many evil things to him, but without any substantial proof, he couldn't blame the mistake on Jarges, and was left blaming himself.

Ren was so confused, bewildered, depressed, and disappointed, that he had no idea, at the time, that the 3 stooges, in a secret plan made with the girls, had played a "practical joke" on him to make him look stupid and foolish.

Ren was tricked into taking that ride to Longmeadow, by the 3 stooges, when they told him they were going to a party at a house with some girls. It turned out to be some kind of practical joke to make him look stupid and feel bad about himself for being the way he was. He simply did not understand at the time why they did it.

He wasn't even thinking about what had happened in June of 78, when he declined the invitation to "go naked" with the step-brother and his friends. All he could think of was the awful mistake he had made with Vesa in 75 and wondered if he would ever get a chance to make up for it. He didn't see things the way the others did at the time.

He didn't understand why they would pull something like a "practical joke" on him.

Ren agreed to go because he liked girls and because it sounded like it would be fun and he had nothing better to do at the time. So he rode all the way to the town, and when he followed the guys to the door and the girls let them in, one of the girls met him at the door with a frown and turned him away. She told him that they didn't have any room for him and shut the door in his face. He had to walk all the way home in total disappointment.

He didn't know at the time that it was a practical joke used to humiliate him. The guys who got him to go with him had actually told the girls about what happened in June, about how he had declined the invitation to get naked with his stepbrother and friends, and the girls agreed to go along with them and turned him away.

It was just like being rejected from a social club. Ren had never felt more rejected and alone in his life. He didn't know it at the time, but it was all just a premeditated practical joke to make him look stupid and feel bad. It was their way of saying to Ren, "We don't like you, go away!"

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After Ren rejected the notion of getting naked with step-brother and his friends on that fatal day in June of 78, they all hated him and rejected him completely. He was turned away from them all, including his own friends, one after another, until he had no friends left in the world, and was completely alone.

Everyone who was a member of the "Naked Club" was warned about him after that day. He was completely rejected by everyone within his own generation, because the "Naked Club" was the most popular summer-time activity club within the world at that time, mainly with the "antiwar pacifists" and Protestants who took the helm after the Vietnam war.

It was also something that acted as a strong social bond between Protestants and Catholics who considered themselves "enlightened".

In other words, that devious little trick that Jarges played on him in the summer of 1978 caused him to become the biggest reject in the world. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him after that fatal day.

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How Step-Brother Fooled Me in 1978 and I was Pushed Out of Suburban Paradise

"I almost had a normal life in 1975, until my jealous, evil step-brother went behind everyone's backs and ruined it all for me, after he fed misinformation to our parents and I was sent on a fool's errand just to get me out of the way.

"The missing part of the mystery about why I reacted the way I did in the

summer of 1978, after my step-brother made me look like the biggest fool in the world, was the fact that he ed on misinformation to my mother in 1975 which led to mother's mistake in the decision to send me away on the fool's errand just to get me away from Vesa.

"Absolutely nobody knew about that misinformation in 1978 because stepbrother had managed to keep that dirty secret to himself.

"When I reacted with an obvious lack of trust in step-brother, because I knew from my own personal experience about all the evil things he had done to me, and I suspected he had something to do with the fool's errand of 75, but I couldn't prove it, nobody understood why but me.

"Perhaps I should have confronted him on it right then and there, if I only had a little real from anyone at all behind the scenes, but i was alone and my reaction was simply to decline to play step-brother's summer game, without realizing that it was actually an invitation to an exclusive club, and that my declination would lead to my complete alienation from humanity.

"After declining to get naked with step-brother on that summer day in 1978, I was slowly but surely pushed out of the summer club completely by everyone, rejected for simply not wanting to play step-brother's naked games on that fatal day. By the end of 1978, I had almost no friends left in the world.

"Everyone had been exposed to the lies of my step-brother and they all hated and rejected me.

"I lost my job and my apartment in 1980 and had nothing but a motorcycle. I was all set to hit the road on the bike when someone told me that my older brother, the one just out of the Navy, and his wife, were moving back to the state locality.

"I can't recall exactly how it all happened, but somebody, probably my mom, talked me into living with them for a while. Well, I always got along with my oldest brother because he was always fair with me, unlike the step-brother, who enjoyed whipping me into pain for his own sadistic pleasure.

"So I lived with my oldest brother between 1980 and 1982, in a couple of different places, and then John Lennon was shot in Hawaii, and we had a fight, and I got kicked out into the cold.

"I can't recall very much detail from 1981 and 1982, just main events, dates and places, etc... I was desperate for some kind of decent source of income, that much I know, and barely getting by on bread and water.

"In March of 1982, I was so desperate that I actually agreed to do a 2 year service in the Air Force. I don't think I've ever been so desperate for a good job and a decent life than I was at that time.

"But the Air Force deal went bad when I suffered from insomnia every night (a

problem I had forgotten about somehow in my enthusiasm to do something), and actually experienced a "freak out" due to lack of REM sleep and dreams during the second week.

"I recall how it was at the time. Every night the lights in the flight went out at 9 pm and revelry occurred at 4:30 am. I suffered insomnia every night, didn't get to sleep until about 2 or 3 am, got woke up at 4:30, and with no more than an hour or 2 of sleep, every night, I slowly turned into a walking zombie due to lack of REM sleep.

"Yes, well, that was what happened. The psyche doctors at the base didn't really know at the time nor did I because I simply knew nothing about lack of REM sleep and its adverse effects upon the mind at the time.

"Well, I "freaked out" in the middle of the down-time at the flight, during the second week, while I was experiencing a nightmare where I was paralyzed on the bunk and the base was being bombed to hell all around me. I was yelling when someone took notice, called the CO on duty, and a doctor or nurse injected my arm as another stood by and kept me still.

"I overslept in the flight bunk while the others were up and about with their regular duties. The guard on duty saw me and told me that the CO wanted to see me in the office. While I was in the office, the CO typed out a report and explained to me that they had to let me go because they didn't want me to jump off the fire-escape like another guy did in the previous flight before me.

"I was discharged, carried through channels by a buddy or a junior officer, evaluated, and sent to one of the oldest sections of the base, where the old World War 2 buildings were still standing and being used.

"I was assigned quarters with 3 complete strangers, all being discharged for various reasons. We spent 2 nights in a tight little room with 2 double bunk beds before being fully processed and discharged.

"Those 2 days and nights in that discharge outlet were like something from the Outer Limits or the Twilight Zone. The days were gray as old black and white photos and the nights were like something from Ray Bradbury's "October Country", eerie and awesome at the same time.

"I felt a little like a secret agent because I had intelligence on my side, but at the same time, I felt like I was embarking on a mission into the unknown, and the mystery was quite beyond me.

"I managed to get off the base and into San Antonio alright, with the help of a good buddy, but I was on my own after we departed at the bus station, going our separate ways.

"It was a long bus trip back to the home-state, and once I had made it, things didn't go too well. My older brother was somehow very different. He acted like I couldn't be trusted, and we got into a fight.

"By late July, I was homeless, after getting in a physical fight with my oldest brother while his wife and kid witnessed it. I didn't start it. He knocked my tea out of my hands in the back room, and it just went crazy after that. I was kicked out into the cold and slept in the park beside my motorcycle.

"My parents helped me get into an apartment where an old war-buddy of stepfather owned or operated the complex. I had managed to hold onto a paper route that I got through my oldest brother, despite our differences, but paying the rent on that dime was not easy.

"In late October of 1982, as I was headed home from a local club, around 6 or 7 pm, I ed through an intersection on a green light that had a yellow crossing it, and ran smack into the side of a slow automobile. My right leg was caught between the motorbike's engine and the side of the automobile and the ankle was cracked.

"My right leg had a huge gash from the ankle to the knee, the muscle was hanging onto the pants and blood was draining out of the wound all over the place. I was in major panic mode as I convinced the driver to take me to the nearest hospital because I was in extreme pain and didn't see any other way to go.

"The man agreed and took me all the way to the emergency room, handed me to the orderlies and I was dragged to the emergency room leaving a trail of blood along the long hallway.

"I went in and out after that, as the loss of blood made me weak and the pain had me shocked and suspended beneath it, and under the care of the doctors and nurses, I was given something to kill the pain and went completely under.

"I awoke in a dark hospital room an eternity later, with the pain in my leg disturbing me to no end. I couldn't get to sleep, but I kept falling into some kind of hypnogogic state and experiencing odd delusions. The most bizarre of such experiences that I recall was being in a completely dark void of space and flying through rings of light.

"Under the shock of the accident, I had lost most of my memory, and only began to recover it, through word and image association, after a doctor or nurse told me that my "mother' was there to see me.

"I didn't know that I had amnesia, because the minute I saw my mother and she began to talk to me, my mind went to work trying to put together the memories, bit by bit, and it took some time to recall it all.

"I suppose, in retrospect, it was the rings of light that led me to suspect that I had died and my indisol had been transferred. Later, I read about similar "out of body" experiences involving rings of light and it all began to merge in my mind.

"It took me years to recover most of the memory which I had lost, but

eventually, I was able to put it all together. Despite a multivertical system that was designed to suppress past memories, I was able to recover all of my memory and I was able to figure out that my indisol was transferred away from my homeparallel of Earth to the Aton 5 parallel, a dystopian "shadow" of Earth.

"Aton 5 is in the hands of a Neo-Fascist Empire where the individual has lost all civil rights to the state, been robotized to serve the economy, and the U.S. Constitution has been sold to the wealthy, multi-millionaire class of corporate royalty.

"The wealthy corporate royalty treat "individual rights" as privileges of class and wealth, privileges that are too expensive for the poor to afford, because they don't have enough money to pay the Justice department or lawyers what they expect to get, under the Neo-fascist rules. There are double standards for the wealthy and poor.

"Despite all the efforts of the antiwar democrats, after the Neokons took over the Aton 5 parallel in 1981, rich men still went to college and poor men still went to war. In this case, the poor man went to a civil war, in a dirty competition for a decent job in a world mixed up, confused, hell-bent, and refracted away from everything our forefathers and our Constitution wanted for us, where despite all of his efforts to do what was best, the poor working-class man still got knocked down and kicked in the end."

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Chapter Nine: 1979 - 1980: The Social Rejection and Downfall of a Victim of Lies

The Summer of 1979

Zek Stone recalled what happened after 78, between 79 and 82.

After Ren lost his job and could find no work anywhere, he was involved in a motorcycle accident in late 1982 and lost his life within the local parallel.

Appx: 1979-06-17:

In the summer of 1979, Ren had only one friend left in the world: Al Mentor. Al Mentor was a friend from about a kilometer up the street whom he had attended high-school with, and whom he had hung out with outside of school for about 3 years. Ren had first started hanging out with the guy after the fool's errand of 1975, in 1976, after Ren had recovered from the previous bad episode.

Mentor was just one grade behind Ren, but he was much smarter than Ren, when it came to algebra. Apparently, his "Nineth Grade Algebra" course was not "sabotaged", because he had a different teacher, one who had not completely faked his way through the course and neglected the class.

Mentor was also a much better artist than Ren, and both were big fans of science-fiction. They got along quite well most of the time, but when it came to

girls, there were some obvious differences. For one thing, Mentor was taller than him, by almost half a foot, more or less, putting Mentor at well over 6 feet. It wasn't just the height that Mentor had, he also had the build.

To put it simply, Mentor was built like Clark Kent (superman), and he had the brains also, while Ren was more like Jimmy Olsen, the somewhat smaller, young amateur reporter who worked for Kent. This fact was not a problem until the summer of 1979, when Mentor tried to get Ren to spend the weekend night with him and 2 girlfriends at his house, while his parents were on vacation.

One of the girls was Mentor's girlfriend Kris and the other was one of her friends, whom Ren had not met yet.

"We've got the whole house, Ren," he said to him, as he sold him the idea, "Just you and me and the girls."

"Who is the other girl?" Ren said, "I don't like blind dates."

"She's a friend of Kris," he said, "she's real pretty. You'll like her."

Mentor talked him into going to his house, where the girls were waiting. Ren

followed Mentor up the street, to the house, on his motorcycle, and parked in the driveway. He followed Mentor in to see the girls, fully convinced that Mentor was on the level with him.

But when Mentor introduced him to the girl, she frowned at Ren, as if she was horrified, and started to protest. She turned away and the other girl, Mentor's girlfriend Kris, turned away with her. She was obviously quite disappointed in the "blind-date" Mentor had fixed her up with, and so Ren frowned also, turned away, and marched for the door.

Mentor caught up with him in the "breeze-way" leading to the garage and the driveway, and stopped him.

"Hey, Ren," he said, "what's the problem?"

"The problem is her," Ren said, "she doesn't like me!"

"No wait," Mentor said, "it's not that bad. Let me have a talk with her first."

"Forget it, she obviously hates me!" Ren said, stepped outside, and walked to his motorbike.

He put the key into the ignition as Mentor stood and tried to talk him out of going.

Then, quite suddenly, Mentor snatched the key from the ignition, before he could start it, and ran away with it.

"What are you doing?" Ren said to him, "Give me that key!"

"Not until you agree to stay," Mentor said.

Ren thought about the frown of disappointment on the girl's face and the way she reacted after seeing Ren for the first time.

"To hell with it!" he said, decisively. "The girl obviously hates me, I'm leaving!"

Ren didn't expect to be able to get the key back from his friend, so he said, "I have a spare key at my apartment. I'm leaving!"

He didn't care to stay with people that didn't like him or want him around, and that girl obviously didn't like him. What puzzled him was how Mentor failed to see it, even after that bad reaction by the girl.

So, he decided to push the motorcycle home. Even though he was presently residing within a cheap, one-room apartment in the big city, about 10 kilometers away, across the river, he still decided it was better than staying somewhere where he was obviously not wanted.

So, he pushed the Honda 250, all of the 10 kilometers, down the long street in Mawaga, past the old house where he once grew up as a boy, across the traffic circle at the end of the highway.

He pushed it up the long ramp, across the bridge, to the big city. He pushed it into the edge of the south-end of the big city, and up the long street leading to his cheap, one-room apartment.

Once there, he took a much-needed rest, got drunk, and ed out, doing his very best to forget all of his problems, along with the awful frown of disappointment upon the face of the pretty girl he had for a "blind-date" earlier that evening.

Too bad, he thought. She had been pretty, and she had a very sexy body. But she had obviously expected more from the "blind-date". She probably expected Ren to be the same size as Mentor, not shorter and smaller. That was probably it, he guessed. Mentor probably over-sold Ren to her and led her to believe Ren was just like Mentor, same height and size, more or less.

She probably wanted Mentor, not Ren, and when Ren turned out to be so very different, physically, she was disappointed. At least, that was the way Ren interpreted it.

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In 1979, Ren lost the job he had working for a Janitorial service, and about a month later, his old friend Leo Granger got him a job working at a department store, nights, cleaning. It was one of the very last favors that his old friend did for him, in spite of what had happened between them in 1975 and 1978.

No more than 8 months later, in April of 1980, he lost that job, after accidentally being caught in an "incompetence" trap.

The "incompetence trap" worked like this. One of the managers responsible for the cleaning crew told the crew of cleaners, which was 3 or 4 men all total, that there were "bags of candy" that had been opened by thieves, which were put in a specific area on the counter, in the candy section. He told them that they could help themselves to the candy if they wanted, and everyone believed the man, and helped themselves.

That wasn't the problem, exactly. Ren made the mistake of thinking that any bag of candy, found open by them, was okay for taking candy from, not just the open bags in the specific section where all the open bags were kept. One night, Ren found a bag of candy which was open, which was not in the same specific section on the candy counter designated by the manager, and he thought he could take some candy from it.

He was wrong. There was a secret guard posted in a secret security room, overlooking the entire store. The cleaning crew were never told if the guard was posted at night or not, they were left guessing and simply did not know.

That night, the guard saw Ren taking candy from a bag of candy from a different section, aside from the section where the open bags had been placed. The guard reported the infraction to the head of security the very next morning, and Ren was called into the security office.

The security chief put the bag of candy which Ren had been caught "opening" on the desk for him to see, and said, "You were seen opening this bag of candy during last night's shift."

"No," Ren denied the acusation, and defended himself. "It was already open, I just had to get my hand inside, so i opend it a little more."

It was the truth, but the man didn't accept it.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but you were seen taking a bag of candy from a section away from the open bags section. It looked like you opened it there, and we can't let that happen. I'm sorry, but we're gonna have to let you go."

Ren was fired for the act of "incompetence". It was true that the bag had been opened, and that was why Ren thought he could take candy from it. But his mistake had been to assume that he could take the candy from a bag which was not already placed within the open bag section.

In retrospect, Ren suspected someone may have even intentionally placed the open bag there just to entrap someone like him.

After all, when they left a bunch of open bags of candy on the counter like that, in the candy section, one hardly noticed such minor details as the exact location within the candy section as making any difference. When Ren found the bag of candy, opened as it was, he simply failed to see any difference.

And as a result of such an "incompetence trap", he lost his job, and some other lucky young fool took his place.

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The Summer of 1980

Appx: 1980-06-11:

After Ren lost the night job at the department store, it looked like doomsday for him. He tried to explain what happened to his mother and she just couldn't believe it. The old man, the "senior" Jarges, stood in the background, saying nothing.

He stopped saying anything whenever Ren had problems, just quietly seethed in disappointment for his "bastard" son, while the mother made Ren feel guilty. It was as if the old man were simply gloating and saying, "I told you he was hopeless. Now can we toss him out with the trash?"

Everyone thought Ren was the dumbest fool in the world; they just couldn't believe anyone could be so stupid. Of course, whether they realized it or not, the step-brother, the "junior" Jarges, was much more responsible for Ren's failures than any of them realized, save perhaps the old man himself, who favored his lying junior name-sake so much, he could have been in on it by then.

But Ren had been gas-lighted by step-brother's denial and gagged into suppressing the very thought and memories of all the evil things Jarges had done, and the senior Jarges did nothing but reinforce his junior's denials while ing his lies, and Ren had no power to overcome such gas-lighting oppression.

As long as the step-brother escaped any blame for all the evil things he had done to Ren, such as the sabotage of Nineth Grade Algebra, or the lie that led to the fool's errand of 1975, Ren was forced to take all of the blame himself.

Ren was at a great loss and didn't know what to do about it.

Well, whether he realized it or not, the step-brother's lies had already set him up for another waste of time, to keep him busy chasing his own tail getting nowhere, while the step-brother made him look like the biggest fool in the world and took all the favor and love of the mother and the sisters for himself.

The mother spoke to the oldest son, Derk, without Ren's knowledge, again, just as she had back in 1975, and this time, Derk agreed to visit and see if he could help.

She suddenly reported it to Ren one day, while he was still out of work, in May of 1980.

"Derk is coming to visit," she said to him, and it brightened him up a bit, because the oldest brother, Derk, had always been good and fair to him. He did not understand exactly why the oldest brother was visiting, the mother didn't say why.

He didn't see what was happening at the time. He didn't understand that the stepbrother's evil ways had made him look like a hopeless, stupid, incompetent fool to everyone, and they were calling upon the oldest brother for help with his problems.

In retrospect, Zek recalled the memories of the looks on their faces, and the look on the face of his oldest brother, once he was there. It was as if they were all looking at a retard or something. Zek knew where it came from.

The truth of the matter was; the evil manipulations, denials, and lies of the junior Jarges had left Ren taking all of the blame for everything that went wrong, all by himself, with nobody else.

The "junior" Jarges had successfully sabotaged Ren's entire life, denied doing anything wrong, and got away with it all, with the "senior" Jarges's , leaving all of the responsibility and blame upon Ren. The whole family, by that time, thought of Ren as being one of the stupidest little brothers in the world.

As long as the junior Jarges got away with violations, evil manipulations, and lies, all of which disaffected Ren and made him look stupid, while shirking any responsibility at all, Ren was forced to shoulder the burden and responsibility all by himself. Furthermore, at the same time, everyone shook their heads at Ren and thought of him as being one of the dumbest human animals that ever walked the Earth.

Every bad thing that went wrong for Ren, which the evil step-brother Jarges was actually resposnible for, was denied by the step-brother, and the truth was buried, while Ren was forced to take all of the blame himself. Over the years, such bad things turned into a long list, and every bad thing on that list was held against Ren.

The evil step-brother, through years of violations upon Ren's rights, followed by gas-lighting denials, all ed by the senior Jarges, had managed to make Ren look so bad that everyone in the world who knew anything about him, family, friends, community leaders, etc... all thought he was one of the dumbest human beings that ever walked the Earth.

None of them knew that Jarges had anything to do with it, because he denied it, and the senior Jarges always took his side.

So, when the oldest brother, Derk, suddenly reappeared, everyone was hoping that he could help Ren out of the problems he was having. Apparently, they thought the two brothers had got along so well in 1975, when Ren was forced to go on the fool's errand to Virginia and lost Vesa, that the older brother might be able to help him at the time.

Ren recalled the day in which the oldest brother Derk came around in May of 1980. Ren had just purchased the most recent Pink Floyd album, "Wish U Were Here", and decided to play it while Derk was there, because he was a big fan of Pink Floyd too.

It really was nothing more than the sharing of a new Pink Floyd album, it wasn't Ren's fault if the title "Wish U Were Here" was taken too literally by Derk. The way in which Derk looked at him, while they were listening to the tunes, sitting in the back room of the old house, it was as if Derk were trying to solve some kind of puzzle or something.

It was as if he were thinking, "What is Ren's problem? What am I supposed to do about it?"

Well, Ren really didn't expect Derk to make the decision of moving his entire family back to the Mass-state, from Virginia, and he never for once suspected that Derk had actually taken the title of the Pink Floyd album "Wish U Were Here" so damn literally.

Furthermore, he never once suspected that one of Jarges's evil lies had gotten to Derk; the one about him being "gay". The idea that Derk's mind had been corrupted by such an evil lie as the one about him being "gay" had never occurred to Ren at the time.

Nonetheless, despite Ren's bewilderment and confusion, already having been seriously victimized by the lies of Jarges, he thought nothing wrong with the idea of Derk and his family moving back to the Mass-state (though by a year later, Derk itted big regrets).

It was in June of 1980 when the oldest brother Derk and his wife and 5 year-old kid moved back to the Mass-state, after having lived in Virginia for the past 6 years. At the time, they made it seem as if it were entirely due to their own decision, and had nothing to do with Ren.

In retrospect, Zek could not blame Derk for regretting the move back to the

Mass-state, but he failed to understand, at the time, why he did so in the first place. When he suspected it might have had something to do with him, because of his problems, and Derk tended to blame him, he once again realized that the evil step-brother Jarges had actually caused the whole thing.

Of course, he couldn't say very much about Jarges, as long as the step-brother had him gagged with a threat upon his life, but he was able to share something about Jarges that made Jarges look bad, after which Jarges appeared on the scene, started crying and feigning innocence, in complete denial, to absolve himself of any guilt.

As usual, the junior Jarges was able to lie his way out of it and made Ren look guilty and shame-faced in the end, just by lying well. Whenever Jarges was cornered by Ren in such a way, Jarges always managed to pull something out of his keister to make it look like Ren was wrong and that what Jarges had done was a "minor" infraction, in contrast.

At the time, the only thing he lacked was the senior Jarges's , but he managed to absolve himself somehow. After it was all over, Jarges had everyone looking at Ren the wrong way again, as if he was the "bad one". That's just the kind of son-of-satan Jarges was; an expert pathological liar who could lie himself out of anything, just by pointing the finger hard enough at Ren.

It was all about mistakes and stupid things. Jarges loved to point out all of the mistakes and "stupid" things that he had managed to blame on Ren over the years, and he always seemed to be able to pull something recent from the list that he could use against Ren.

The logic Jarges used followed a pattern which had a tendency to blame Ren for all of the bad things Jarges did, simply by pointing out something Ren did earlier, as if anything "bad" that Jarges did was actually caused by Ren, just because Ren made a mistake before that.

The worst part about this was the fact that Jarges may have been responsible for that previous mistake as well, but he managed to lie to the parents so well that the step-father took sides with him, and Ren was forced to take responsibility whether he was guilty or not. Jarges was a pathological liar who knew how to lie about Ren and get away with it, merely because there were no witnesses and the step-father had a history of taking sides with his junior name-sake.

In other words, by that time, in 1980, Jarges had gas-lighted Ren into taking the blame for all of the mistakes that were made, even though Jarges was actually responsible for most of it, and he was able to constantly perpetuate lies which Ren could only deny himself, without any witnesses to take his side, and in the end, it always left the family doubting Ren.

In this way, the step-father had always managed to save his junior name-sake, just by "assuming" that Ren was guilty and Jarges was innocent.

In other words, Jarges had the uncanny ability to deny guilt by blaming it on previous lies about Ren he had already turned into fact, just by getting the senior Jarges to take sides with him, against Ren.

Furthermore, as long as it was Ren's word against Jarges, Jarges usually won simply because the senior Jarges had always taken sides with him, over the years.

By the year 1980, Jarges had the whole family believing things about Ren that were simply not true, all because the senior Jarges took sides with him.

Furthermore, after the senior Jarges and everyone else took sides with him, even though he had lied, he actually began to believe those lies himself, and used them to cover up more lies after the fact, and made Ren look like he was guilty.

It was the pathology to the step-brother's lies; to always use as much lies as he could get away with to make Ren look like the "bad one", so that everyone would reject Ren and favor Jarges.

In retrospect, it was a mistake for Derk to move back to the Mass-state, because he only did so because of all the damage Jarges had done to Ren's life. If it were not for all of the damage Jarges had done to Ren's life, Derk would not have been needed in 1980, and would have had no reason to return to the Mass-state.

Of course, Derk and his family knew nothing about any of it, because Jarges had been such a successful, pathological liar.

At that time, while Jarges was defending himself, Ren still did not know about the "mistake" the mother had made in 1975, and he didn't know that Jarges was hiding the dirty secret that he had lied to the mother in 1975.

In fact, Ren knew very little about the psychological warfare Jarges had conducted against him, with the help of the senior Jarges, for the past 20 years. Ren knew Jarges had violated him, but he couldn't see the forest for the trees, due to all of the lies, gas-lighting denials, and confusion.

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Chapter Ten: Late 1980 to 1982: Working with Derk

Zek recalled the events from late 1980 up until the accident in late 1982. In spite of decades of attempts at recovering the details of the memory, most of it was lost in a very depressed, smoky-glass obscurity, and all that remained were a few very significant memories which could not be forgotten.

Ren resided in the old house in Mawaga, with Derk, his wife, and kid, from September of 1980 to the summer of 1982.

Shortly after they settled into the house, Ren tried to tell Derk about what happened in 1975, when he visited Derk in Virginia. They were sitting in the living room, watching some stupid sit-comedy, which Ren saw no humor in whatsoever. Derk was laughing at it though, well enough, while practically ignoring Ren.

Ren told him about Vesa, for the very first time, about how he left her, in the summer of 1975, under the mother's directions, how he lost her and regretted it terribly. Much to Ren's disappointment, he got nothing from Derk but a bad joke and another laugh, and not a trace of sympathy or understanding at all. Less than a minute later, Derk was ignoring him and laughing at the stupid sit-com again.

Apparently, Ren had completely failed to get through to Derk, so he just left him and went to his room, and sulked within the continual depression. At that time, he felt hopeless. He thought that if Derk couldn't help him with his problem, then nobody could.

Later that year, while Ren was wondering what to do, about as lost as an indisol could get, something happened that shocked the world that he could never forget.

John Lennon, the famous rock-star member of the Beetles, was shot and killed in Hawaii.

Ren was in his room upstairs in the old house, when he heard a knock on his bedroom door. He stepped up and opened the door. It was his oldest brother, Derk.

Derk told him about Lennon getting shot and killed in Hawaii, and Ren didn't know what to make of it. Ren was already about as depressed as he could get and news like that barely had an effect upon him, because at that point, he felt dead himself.

He didn't know how to respond to it, but apparently, whatever he said, it wasn't good enough for Derk, who was one of the biggest fans of the Beetles and John Lennon in the world.

As Derk was leaving, heading down the steps, Ren heard him mutter something like, "Sounds like he killed him," much to Ren's surprise. All Ren could think, in his mind was, "Does he really think that about me?"

It made him mad to think his oldest brother, whom he had respected so much more than any other member of the family for so long, because he always thought Derk was more intelligent, could possibly think such a thing of him. What the hell was wrong with Derk? How could he think such a thing?

Ren knew at the time that he was depressed, but what really bothered him was the simple fact that Derk didn't seem to notice it. Why didn't he notice it? Why had Derk become so completely insensitive and careless towards Ren?

Ren didn't realize it at the time, but apparently it was another one of Jarges's lies that was the problem. It was the lie about Ren being a "gay weak-link" that was getting in the way. Apparently, Derk had been fool enough to believe that lie, without itting it to Ren or anyone, and it had become a "mental block" between them.

Derk was one of those fools who believed the "gay weak-link lie" about Ren, while pretending not to notice or hold it against him, at the same time he suppressed the thought by intentionally changing the subject within his mind. That was probably why Ren failed to get through to him when he tried to tell him about what happened in 75 and how he lost Vesa.

In retrospect, recalling the memory, Zek saw that Derk was intentionally ignoring him while letting the sit-com distract him, because in his own mind, he couldn't quite suppress the idea that Ren was "gay" and trying to "get closer to him" about something too personal for Derk to handle.

At least, that was one explanation for why Ren failed to get through to him on that day. If it wasn't that, then apparently, his older brother just simply did not care about him at all, and he found that somewhat hard to believe, at the time.

Zek could well imagine that Jarges had probably reinforced the idea that Ren was a "gay weak-link" every chance he got to talk with Derk, and led him to believe that the reason why Ren had failed with the girl had nothing to do with Jarges and everything to do with Ren being a "gay weak-link".

That was Jarges: he always made up another lie to cover-up any of the evil things he did to Ren. Even before he was accused of lying to their mother about Ren and getting him sent on the fool's errand in 75, Jarges had already stacked the deck against Ren, so that Ren would always look like the guilty one.

So, if Jarges did something to hurt Ren, with no witnesses, Jarges could always blame Ren for it by calling him "too stupid", and if calling Ren "too stupid" didn't nail him, then he could always blame him for being "gay" and "weak".

In other words, Jarges and others who believed his lies were able to blame things that went wrong for Ren on his "gayness" and "weakness", two traits that went hand-in-hand, according to all of the mucho "macho" males who dominated the females at that time.

Everyone in the world thought of "gay" males as being "weak-links" in the early 1980s. Even the girls who tended to hate men thought of "gay" males as being "weak-links", and enjoyed laughing at them almost as much as the lying fascist

males who enjoyed persecuting "stupid little brothers" for being "gay weaklinks."

History will record, if it hasn't already, that males branded as "gay weak-links" were commonly used as scapegoats by fascists. My own family could not see through the gas-lighting and lies instigated upon me by the step-brother, ergo, they blamed the "gay weak-link", just the way the step-father and step-brother wanted it.

One of the worst aspects to the "gay weak-link lie" was the simple fact that almost nobody in the world suspected it could be a lie because everyone was too busy trying to decide whether or not they approved of such a thing as "homosexual males" within their midst.

On the one hand, there were those who did not approve and they reacted with revulsion, repugnance, and hatred, without even doubting the "gay lie" to begin with. On the other hand, there were those who did not completely disapprove, who said things like, "It's okay, we don't mind," without doubting the source of the "gay weak-link lie" either.

In either case, the one thing missing was any "doubt" about the source of the "gay weak-link lie". Neither side even bothered to question the veracity of the "gay weak-link lie".

Apparently, once a "gay weak-link lie" gets going, there are so many people who don't doubt it or question it that it has a very anti-social effect upon its victim,

causing almost everyone to look at the victim as if it were true, and either holding it against them and hating them for it or "not" holding it against them and "not hating" them for it.

Neither party bothered to even question the veracity of the information which made the person out to be a "gay weak-link".

In some cases, the victim of the "gay weak-link lie" might find out about it, from a friend, and might be able to stop it before it did any real damage. But in all too many cases, that does not happen.

In the case of Ren Tenrut, he did not find out about the "gay weak-link lie" told about him by Jarges until a couple of years after Jarges started it, because nobody bothered to question him on it. He was pronounced "guilty" before being given a chance to defend himself and did not even realize it.

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Ren experienced something, late in 1980, after Lennon was killed, which completely confused him, something so absolutely alien and unknown, that to this day, whenever Zek Stone recalls it, he still cannot quite make any sense of it, no matter how hard he tries.

But he does recall the experience, in any case, and tries to make sense of it. This recollection of the event will be yet another attempt.

Ren felt completely alone late in 1980, after failing to get through to his oldest brother Derk, for help with the matter.

One night, he fell onto the rug on the floor of his bedroom, in the dark, and couldn't get back up. He was paralyzed and couldn't talk or move. He was completely alone in the dark, with not even a single night-light to help him see the room around him.

As he lied there, paralyzed and unable to speak, the room disappeared and he was somewhere else, in a deep, dark cavern, possibly underground. He had no idea where he was nor any idea what was happening. He felt like he was in one of the lowest levels of hell, paralyzed and unable to move, on the stone floor of a huge cavern.

At first, he thought he was completely alone, but then he thought he heard something, like low, slow-moving bass baritone sounds. His eyes were still working but it was too dark to see much of anything. When he tried to see what was around him, he suddenly got the impression that there were some kind of hellish beasts all around him, and that if he wasn't careful, they might eat him.

He lied there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out what he could do to escape it, but it was hopeless. It was almost as if time had slowed down to a near stand-still, and Ren was having a really hard time, the hardest time he had ever experienced, managing his sanity for so long.

The experience could not be justified by mere words after the fact. It was, for Ren, just like being in hell for an eternity. That was how it was at the time, but even after it was over, when he tried to recall it and understand it, it was impossible to put into words, without losing quite a lot of the experience.

For Ren, at the time, it really did seem like it lasted forever. As hard as that may seem for anyone else to imagine, it was true.

Ren's reasonable side told him it had something to do with relativity and time, as the human mind perceives it, on different levels of consciousness. Apparently, Ren's consciousness had been affected at the time, in a way he did not understand.

It was the longest night he had ever experienced.

When it was finally over, and the sun arose to light another day, whether or not he realized it at the time, something was different.

He was so out of it that he actually forgot all about the election that occurred in late 1980.

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1981: Working a Paper Route with Big Brother

In 1981, Ren's oldest brother Derk got a job working with the local Newspaper, managing the delivery of newspapers in a town about 15 miles to the northeast. They were living in the old house, in Mawaga, where they had spent their youth, while attending grade-school. The parents had rented the house out to Derk, and Derk had agreed to let Ren stay with them.

Ren was having his own problems, since he had lost all of his friends and couldn't find a job. As it turned out, however, Derk needed someone to help him deliver the newspapers, and so he went to work for Derk.

Ren was, at the time, so desperate for some kind of direction, that he actually went to work with Derk just to pay for room and board, and made no money from the job at all. When he needed money for something "necessary", such as gas for his motorbike (which he needed to deliver papers), he had to tell Derk and the older brother would give him what he needed.

Now and then, when they lost a paper-deliverer somewhere in the town, Ren had to fill in until they were able to find a replacement, and he delivered the papers house-to-house by motorbike. He was able to make some money from the tips he recieved from the collections every week from those routes. He recieved about $25 dollars in tips from about 50 addresses. Some were houses, others were apartments.

But aside from that, he never recieved any other money, because the job barely paid for the room and board. He knew he had to do something more with his socalled life, he just didn't know what. He felt so depressed that he lacked any motivation whatsover, and hated himself for the mistake which was the "fool's errand of 1975".

But he knew he had to do something and working as a newspaper delivery man for Derk to pay for the room and board seemed like the thing to do at the time. The motorbike he had was perfect for the job; with 2 saddlebags, on both sides, to carry papers.

But it wasn't enough, and he knew it. In fact, Derk and his wife, Suzanne, often sat with him in the living room and talked about the possibilities. During the late summer of 1981, they both suggested that Ren might be able to get a job with the local "Carnival" simply because he dabbled with the independent arts.

Ren dismissed the idea, much to their disappointment, for two reasons.

Number One: Ren was a very poor artist. Ren knew he was not good enough to work with a carnival. His work never won any awards, never got any respect from anyone at all, save from Derk.

Derk was the one who originally led him to believe that he should be an artist,

and "not a writer", after catching Ren hammering at an old typewriter one day, telling a story. Whenever Ren recalled the incident, later, he always thought it was really odd, for Derk to suddenly intervene like that and actually tell him to "stop" writing, and suggest that he spend his time "drawing" instead.

In retrospect, Ren decided Derk was wrong somehow, to take control of him like that and tell him not to "write" when he felt like it. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with Ren writing at that time, and it was wrong for Derk to make him feel bad about it.

In time, Ren came to realize, that writing, for him, was necessary. Ren needed to be able to write well, just to reorganize his thoughts and memories, after they had been corrupted by the gas-lighting step-brother's lies.

In retrospect, Zek Stone knew he needed the ability to write well to recollect the details of the memories he had lost, after the accident, to exonerate himself from the guilt placed upon his shoulders by the evil lies and gas-lighting manipulations of his step-brother, Jarges.

Number Two: Ren had been so alienated from humanity by his stepbrother's lies, that he had zero confidence in himself and failed to meet the "status quo" expected for a social, human animal.

In other words, due to the gas-lighting sabotage by the evil step-brother, he had been left with no personal motivation, feeling like there wasn't a soul in the universe that wanted to have anything to do with him.

So when they suggested he try to work with the carnival that year, he just could not see it happening. He couldn't imagine how to do such a thing, it was quite beyond him. He really just didn't have that kind of a "social" personality. Jarges had taken all of the "charm", along with just about everything else, and left Ren with next to nothing.

Of course, neither of the two brainiacs he was forced to settle for help with at the time understood the psychology there, because whether they realized it or not, their minds had already been corrupted by the step-brother's lies about Ren.

By September of 1981, Derk and Suzanne had Ren feeling guilty for not finding any other work, and that was when he first started to really feel desperate. He realized at the time that both of his brothers, Derk and Jarges, had done 2 years of "service" with the military, which was something that Ren had never done.

Derk had been in the Navy and Jarges had been in the Army. Based upon those facts, Ren made it easy for himself and chose to "enlist" in the Air Force. It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.

So Ren decided to let the pressure off of his brother Derk and his family, and made himself scarce by ing the Air Force. It turned out to be another mistake, but he had to do it, nonetheless, just to prove to himself that he had the "guts" and the "nerve" that was expected from him, if he ever expected to get back into the human race.

It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

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Chapter 11: 1982: A Discharge from the Air Force and an Accident in late 82.

Zek Stone recalled when he was Ren Tenrut in early 1982, when he decided to the Air Force.

Ren took an early morning enger jet, along with half a dozen "recruits", in early March of 1982, to Atlanta, Georgia, and then on to San Antonio, Texas.

Even before they boarded the jet-plane, something funny occurred, which appeared to be some kind of test, to see if they had the "nerve" to be Air Force personnel. The desk clerk reported to them, as they were receiving their tickets, that there was some bad weather over Atlanta at the time, and they had to make up their own minds whether or not they still wanted to take the flight.

Ren and the others got together in a huddle, not knowing what to do, and Ren suggested that they ask whether the flight had been canceled or not. So someone asked the question to the desk clerk, and the clerk said, "No, the flight has not been canceled."

The way Ren figured it, it might have been some kind of test. If there was some "bad weather" over Atlanta but the flight had not been canceled, that probably meant it wasn't "too bad" and they thought they could handle it.

Ren turned to the others and said, "This might be a test. We're supposed to be in the Air Force, right?"

Ren stepped up to the counter and said, "I'm going."

After Ren took the lead and agreed to take the flight, the other recruits followed.

Ren was a nervous wreck through the whole flight, since it was his very first jetplane flight, and the "bad weather" over Atlanta didn't make it any easier. As it turned out, they had to circle Atlanta for almost an hour before a window opened for them to safely land.

The plane had to refuel in Atlanta, before moving on to San Antonio, Texas. There were no more problems with bad weather and the landing in San Antonio was smooth. They took a bus from San Antonio to the base in Lackland, Texas, just as the sun was setting, late in the day.

It was one of the strangest experiences Ren had ever had. It was like going to a private "night school" for the first time, where he was expected to follow very strict rules of behavior, like a robot, while being commanded about by a couple of very robotic officers in uniform.

The recruits were taken off the bus, put into a line, and names were called. After a person's name was called, they were told to stand aside, and after all were properly ed for, they were broken up in smaller groups and taken away, to be assigned to different departments and "flights".

The term "flight" was used to refer to the buildings where they were assigned quarters, as it was with all new recruits, which were referred to as "airmen". The flights were large rooms which were on one side of an entire level, with 2 "flights" per level. Within the flights were two large rooms, where the "bunks" for sleeping and the personal lockers were, and an office, day-room, showers, and bathroom.

The entire flight of about 24 airmen met in the day-room to be instructed by the CO the very next day, and they learned about the daily schedule and all of the things they had to do "before" the regular "basic training" began, which had to be done within the first days.

Those "things" they had to do involved a "tour" of the base, getting haircuts and "green" uniforms, filling out a few forms, standing in lines for what seemed like hours, sitting in classes listening to lectures about the Air Force, its mission and goals, etc...

When it came time for Ren to make some kind of formal decision about what department he wanted to work in, he was lost, had a hard time deciding, and eventually decided to choose "telecommunications" because he was interested in the new computer technology upgrades. The field was very wide and there were all kinds of opportunities there.

It was unfortunate for Ren that he simply wasn't "cut out" for the military services. His problem was psychological; he couldn't act like a perfect robot, in every way expected. Oh, sure, he could do the work alright. That wasn't the

problem.

The problem Ren had while going through basic training in Lackland was insomnia. He couldn't get to sleep, like a good robot, after the lights went out, every night at 9 pm. He couldn't stop worrying about everything, over and over, to no end, and couldn't get to sleep. He actually suffered from insomnia, every night, for the whole first week of basic training, and didn't get to sleep until early in the morning, just before reveille, which occurred at 4:30 am.

Ren didn't know it at the time, but he suffered not just from insomnia, but from lack of "REM-sleep", and a lack of dreams. Apparently, because he suffered from insomnia and didn't get to sleep until an hour or two before reveille at 4:30 am, he didn't have enough time to dream.

After suffering from insomnia and lack of REM-sleep (and dreams), for over a week, by the second week, Ren was beginning to experience odd aberrations within his sensory reception, what might be referred to as "delusions" and "hallucinations".

For example, on one day, while he was sitting in the flight on his bunk, working on something by his locker, he looked up and saw someone he hadn't seen before, a stranger, sitting across the flight, on another bunk, staring at him. As he looked back at the stranger, he assumed it was one of the airmen he hadn't taken notice of yet, and tried to recognize him.

The young man stared back at him, directly into his eyes, and Ren heard a voice

say, in his mind, "I got on the wrong flight."

Ren heard the words clearly in his mind, then looked down for a second. When he looked back up, the young man was gone, as if he had just "vanished" into thin air. Ren stepped up and looked about the flight, but could find the young man nowhere. He had mysteriously disappeared and Ren didn't know what to make of it. He checked the whole flight, even the bathroom, but the man was nowhere on the flight.

To this day, Zek Stone recalls the experience as another one of the mysteries from his past which he had never quite been able to explain, like so many episodes from the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.

Which is where it went for him, after that, as his mind suffered from the lack of REM-sleep and his consciousness succumbed to the adverse side-effects, without his knowledge at the time.

During the second week, after about 10 or 12 days, Ren experienced what was referred to as a "freak out", due to the lack of REM-sleep. No one knew why it happened at the time, but logical deduction, after years of research and recall, spelled it out well enough.

Ren knew he had suffered from insomnia at the time, he simply didn't make the connection with lack of REM-sleep until years later, after being discharged.

It was just another night in the flight, when Ren was lying there, on his bunk, still worrying about everything over and over again, as usual for him. He hadn't yet conquered his insomnia and was having the same problems, worrying to no end about everything, unable to break the vicious cycle of worry over everything in the world.

This time, however, he fell into something rock-hard that shocked him and left him paralyzed to the bunk in fear of his life. The base was being bombed, out of nowhere, quite suddenly, and he was paralyzed on the bunk, unable to move.

He began crying out loud, yelling in the dark, as he felt he was left alone and nobody seemed to care what happened to him. He was paralyzed and unable to move, and all he could do was yell out, as the bombs were exploding all over the base around them.

He heard someone call out his name in a report, as if they were telling someone else about him.

"It's Tenrut," the voice said, as the bombs continued to explode about him.

He yelled out for some kind of help, as the flight was still in the dark, and 2 men whose faces could not be seen approached him. One took a hold of him, and tried to settle him, as he felt the pin-prick of a needle in his arm, and shortly after

that, he fell into a deep sleep.

The next day, he slept late, and when he finally awoke, one of the airmen told him to report to the CO, in the office.

"I'm sorry you couldn't cut it," the Commanding Officer said to him, as he typed at the desk, while Ren sat there and took his medicine.

"We're going to have to let you go," he said. "We had an airmen in the last flight who jumped off the fire-escape and killed himself. We can't take any chances like that with you."

Ren thought about it and realized he was right about that. The flight was on the fourth level of the building, and a fall from the fire-escape could easily get a man killed. But Ren was still in something of a shock, without understanding what was happening.

Something had happened last night, he just didn't know what. He didn't understand what was happening, exactly, but something had gone wrong, he had a really bad dream, or rather, a "nightmare", and awoke all alone on his bunk, late in the morning, which was obviously quite unusual for an airman in such a robotic military program.

But when the CO spoke to him about it, he understood something had gone

wrong, like he had blown a fuse or something, and he was being discharged from the flight, and possibly from the Air Force, because of it.

The CO filled out a report on him, then had him sent through channels, to evaluate his condition and determine what to do with him. He spent an hour taking a "psyche" test before being sent to another base psychologist, who filled out his discharge papers, and sent him to the old WW2 section of the base, where psychological cases were discharged.

Man, what a trip through the Twilight Zone that was.

Zek Stone recorded the episode at Lackland, Texas, and the accident that occurred later that year, in his journal:

"I can't recall very much detail from 1981 and 1982, just main events, dates and places, etc... I was desperate for some kind of decent source of income, that much I know, and barely getting by on bread and water.

"In March of 1982, I was so desperate that I actually agreed to do a 2 year service in the Air Force. I don't think I've ever been so desperate for a good job and a decent life than I was at that time.

"But the Air Force deal went bad when I suffered from insomnia every night (a problem I had forgotten about somehow in my enthusiasm to do something), and actually experienced a "freak out" due to lack of REM-sleep and lack of dreams

during the second week.

"I recall how it was at the time. Every night the lights in the flight went out at 9 pm and reveille occurred at 4:30 am. I suffered insomnia every night, didn't get to sleep until about 2 or 3 am, got woke up at 4:30, and with no more than an hour or 2 of sleep, every night, I slowly turned into a walking zombie due to lack of REM sleep.

"Yes, well, that was what happened. The psyche doctors at the base didn't really know at the time nor did I because I simply knew nothing about lack of REM sleep and its adverse effects upon the mind at the time.

"Well, I "freaked out" in the middle of the down-time at the flight, during the second week, while I was experiencing a nightmare where I was paralyzed on the bunk and the base was being bombed to hell all around me. I was yelling when someone took notice, called the CO on duty, and a doctor or nurse injected my arm as another stood by and kept me still.

"I overslept in the flight bunk while the others were up and about with their regular duties the next morning. The guard on duty saw me and told me that the CO wanted to see me in the office. While I was in the office, the CO typed out a report and explained to me that they had to let me go because they didn't want me to jump off the fire-escape like another guy did in the previous flight before me.

"I was discharged, carried through channels by a buddy or a junior officer, evaluated, and sent to one of the oldest sections of the base, where the old World War 2 buildings were still standing and being used.

"I was assigned quarters with 3 complete strangers, all being discharged for various reasons. We spent 2 nights in a tight little room with 2 double bunk beds before being fully processed and discharged.

"Those 2 days and nights in that discharge outlet were like something from the Outer Limits or the Twilight Zone. The days were gray as old black and white photos and the nights were like something from Ray Bradbury's "October Country", eerie and awesome at the same time.

"I suppose it was because it was late March, at the time, at the end of the winter season. I had never spent the end of the winter season in Texas before. It was probably all the dry dead weeds, leafless branches on the trees, and the smokyglass atmosphere that reminded me of late October, in New England.

"Up against the old WW2 buildings in a permanent dusk, it was an eerie, mysterious atmosphere, just like being on the border of the Twilight Zone.

"I felt a little like a secret agent because I had intelligence on my side, but at the same time, I felt like I was embarking on a mission into the unknown, and the mystery was quite beyond me.

"I managed to get off the base and into San Antonio alright, with the help of a good buddy, but I was on my own after we departed at the bus station, going our separate ways.

"It was a long bus trip back to the home-state, and once I had made it, things didn't go too well.

"By late July, I was homeless, after getting in a physical fight with my oldest brother while his wife and kid witnessed it. I didn't start it. He knocked my tea out of my hands in the back room, and it just went crazy after that.

"I was kicked out into the cold and slept in the park beside my motorcycle. I was homeless, without a single friend in the world, for most of the summer of 1982.

"My parents helped me get into an apartment where an old war-buddy of stepfather owned or operated the complex. I had managed to hold onto a paper route that I got through my oldest brother, despite our differences, but paying the rent on that dime was not easy.

"In late October of 1982, as I was headed home from a local club, around 6 or 7 pm, I ed through an intersection on a green light that had a yellow crossing it, and ran smack into the side of a slow automobile. My right leg was caught between the motorbike's engine and the side of the automobile and the ankle was

cracked.

"My right leg had a huge gash from the ankle to the knee, the muscle was hanging onto the pants and blood was draining out of the wound all over the place. I was in major panic mode as I convinced the driver to take me to the nearest hospital because I was in extreme pain and didn't see any other way to go.

"The man agreed and took me all the way to the emergency room, handed me to the orderlies and I was dragged to the emergency room leaving a trail of blood along the long hallway.

"I went in and out after that, as the loss of blood made me weak and the pain had me shocked and suspended beneath it, and under the care of the doctors and nurses, I was given something to kill the pain and went completely under.

"I awoke in a dark hospital room an eternity later, with the pain in my leg disturbing me to no end. I couldn't get to sleep, but I kept falling into some kind of hypnogogic state and experiencing odd delusions. The most bizarre of such experiences that I recall was being in a completely dark void of space and flying through rings of light.

"I suppose, in retrospect, it was the rings of light that led me to suspect that I had died and my indisol had been transferred. Later, I read about similar "out of body" experiences involving rings of light and it all began to merge in my mind.

"It was a day and night of pain and insomnia after that, before someone told me that my "mother" was there to see me. Up until that point, I was in too much pain most of the time, or too drugged out by codeine, to think about anything beyond the limited walls of the hospital room. I had completely forgotten about everything aside from the accident itself, which was one of the most painful experiences i had ever had.

"When they mentioned "mother", my memory went searching and wondered who my mother was. At the time, I had actually suffered some memory-loss, but when mother was mentioned, my memory went to work, searching for an image of "mother".

"When mother visited, she looked somehow different than I imagined, but my head was so messed up at the time by all the pain and codeine, I barely noticed. She handed some magazines to me, for something to read, and said that Derk, my older brother, had supplied them.

"My memory went to work with the names mother mentioned, and from everything she said, I was able to put together enough memory to get a fair picture of everything, as far as the family went.

"But later, after my leg had healed and I could walk on both legs again, I didn't even get to take the local tour before I was put on a bus, bound for California, in late April of 1983. I didn't know it at the time, but they were just trying to get rid of me again.

"It was a "fool's errand" that they hoped would cast me away from them, once and for all. No doubt, step-father and step-brother both agreed that it was the best way to deal with such a "stupid fool".

"Btw, nobody signed my cast, because I didn't have a single friend left in the world by late 1982."

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Chapter 12: 1983 - 1985: Lost in Los Angeles

Sometime after the accident, in either late 1982 or early 1983, Ren's mother confessed to him about a "mistake" she made in the summer of 1975. Ren was still in a cast, with his leg healing, on codeine for the pain, when she told him about it.

She confessed that she made a mistake when she sent Ren away in the summer of 1975, because she thought he was seeing Lucinda, the older sister of Vesa, and she feared that Lucinda would corrupt him in some way, because Lucinda had a "bad" reputation.

Ren was on codeine for the pain in his leg at the time, but received the message, and quietly suppressed his bleeding heart over the memory, and acknowledged the mother's "confession" to the "mistake".

He wasn't quite sure what to make of it, but apparently, it suggested that Ren had been "mistakenly sent away" on the fool's errand, in the summer of 75, to get him away from "Lucinda", not Vesa.

He looked down, wondering what to make of it, while realizing that after 7 years, the damage had been done, and it was too late to do anything about it. He felt terribly depressed and didn't know what to do.

He had no idea where Vesa was and after 7 years, it was next to impossible for

Ren to expect to be able to locate her and tell her about it. It was highly probable that she was already married and wouldn't have the least bit of interest in him anymore.

He had to get back onto his own two feet before he could expect to do anything whatsover about the problem. But in his mind, as he thought it over, with not a single friend left in the world to talk to about it, he decided it was too late.

His self-confidence was at an all-time low and he thought Vesa hated him and didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. In his mind, he decided it was too late to undo the damages that had been done.

But that was before he made the connection between mother's mistake and the misinformation ed onto her by Jarges, just before the fool's errand in the summer of 1975.

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After getting back on his own 2 feet without the cast or crutches in the spring of 1983, Ren's mother visited and told him that the family had decided, once again, what was best for him. This time, they agreed with the oldest brother Dirk, who suggested that he needed some kind of "vacation" in Southern California.

Ren didn't know it at the time, but it really was just another "fool's errand" to get rid of him. Because of all the damages done by the step-brother's gas-lighting and lies, Ren appeared to them to be one of the dumbest human animals on the planet Earth, and they didn't want to waste any more time and money on him.

Coincidentally, Jarges made it all much easier when he agreed to "buy" Ren's somewhat "refracted" motorbike, which had somehow managed to stay on the road, in spite of a slightly "bent" set of handle-bars, due to the accident. Jarges gave him $300 for it, which turned out to be just enough for the "one-way" ticket, with about $100 left over for food and water.

So, they put him on a bus, with a "one-way ticket" to California, in late April, before he even had a chance to take the local tour and recover the details of his lost memory.

In retrospect, he wished he had stayed at that time, but there was nowhere to turn to. He had no friends left and the family had him under their control like a zombie-robot with a fluoridated brain.

When they led him to think that the "vacation" in California was just what he needed, he actually went along with the idea and completely believed it. He really had no idea what else to do at the time, so he followed their instructions, got the ticket, got on the bus, and took the bus-ride, all the way to Los Angeles, California.

When he finally got there, he didn't have enough money for a room, barely

enough to survive on for more than a day or two, and had absolutely no idea what to do.

Like any common, working-class fool on a vacation in Los Angeles for the very first time, all he could think about was heading for the beautiful seaside for some "fun in the sun". Unfortunately, with less than 20 bucks left to survive on, it turned out to be much more difficult and complicated than he expected.

Within a day after getting off of the bus, he was "lost" in Los Angeles.

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Note: I was unable to recall everything that happened while i was lost in LA, in perfect chronological order, but I was able to recall specific days and interesting events, which stood out in my memory, in a nonsequential order.

I have been able to recall most of what happened, but putting it all together in exact order within my memory has been impossible, because I simply cannot recall the exact dates or times for any of it.

I have been able to make general guesses about most of it, placing it either in the autumn, winter, spring, or summer, but I was too busy surviving and never managed to get into any kind of secure position anywhere. I did take a some notes, and I lost some of it, but I did manage to hold on to one or two notebooks, with a few thoughts and interesting anecdotes.

I cannot possibly record every detail of my experience in LA, but I'll do the best I can to share as much as I can recall. The "unabridged" version may contain more.

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Ren used a small map he found at the bus-station to figure out which direction was west, looked towards the hill on the western edge of the central courts, and went marching over the hill, on the sidewalk, wondering how many miles it was to the beach, because he couldn't quite figure it on the small map.

The way he figured it was he didn't really care too much, because it was his first time in Los Angeles, and he wanted to take the walkabout tour. But he really had no idea how much larger Los Angeles was, compared to the "big city" of Springfield, which was just across the river from Mawaga, where he had resided with his "family" for most of the first 20 years.

In fact, Los Angeles turned out to be so huge, that Ren got somewhat lost in the complex maze of it all for about 3 or 4 days. He eventually figured out the easiest way to get to the beach was by Santa Monica bus, which went straight to the seaside, to Santa Monica beach, from central LA. When he finally managed to get on the ride, somewhere in the middle of it, the ride to the beach was still about 5 or 6 kilometers.

It was a lot of mixed small town intersections and shops with residential sections

in between for most of it until they reached the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, where there were several interesting, well-known Hollywood landmarks, including Grahman's Theater, with all of the famous star's hand-prints and related cultural interests.

Shortly after that, they drove through an area with many shops and hotels, for about 2 miles, and they reached Santa Monica park, overlooking Santa Monica beach.

It was quite a site and Ren felt relieved that he had finally made it. He hopped off of the bus as it stopped at the first bus-stop right on the corner of the park, not more than 100 meters from the pier with all of the amusements and restaurants.

He walked across the grass, to the railing at the edge of the high, 60 meter cliff, and looked out over the beaches and the wide seaside. It was a beautiful site and he was shortly overwhelmed by the effect.

He spent the day touring the park and relaxing on the benches overlooking the beautiful sky, sea and the horizon. This was more like a vacation, he realized, as he relaxed on a bench and took it all in; the fresh air, the sea breeze, and the great, wide blue space that he had dreamed about ever since he was a kid.

He vaguely recalled the memory of the one day they visited the ocean, when he was still very young, in the late 60s. It was obscured by a mist like an island in an unknown sea, beyond the sharp excitation of the senses he was experiencing

in the present.

That memory had been from an event in his childhood on the east coast. On the west coast, he was able to watch the sun setting on the sea, which was a wonderful, spectral spectacle of planetary nature which he never saw on the east coast.

But the vacation turned into just another day, in less than a week, when he ran out of money and had to scavenge just to survive.

He tried to go north, but after a brief Malibu beach where some surfers practiced their skills, the beaches became private. So he headed south, along the seaside.

When he decided to go south, he ran into about four or five different beaches, including Redondo, Venice, Huntington, and finally, Long Beach, where he spent some time, later at night, sleeping.

Unfortunately, before he got more than an hour of sleep, he was kicked onto his feet by a local gang of bullies who didn't like to share 200 square meters of beach with anyone late at night, unless he was willing to have a few beers with them.

Ren was dead tired from being on his feet all day and declined the invitation. It

turned out to be a "catch-22" and he didn't have a choice. They decided to pelt him with small stones rather than let him share the huge beach with them while sleeping like that.

There were small stone pits all over the back of Long Beach, set apart by about 20 meters, in the sand. Ren was sleeping in the sand near one of the "pits" and the local gang had set up their little party around one of the pits closest to where Ren was, by some odd "coincidence".

The gang treated Ren like an unwanted bum in their private backyard, and pelted him with small stones, while hanging out in the sand beside the closest pit, just 20 meters away.

After the stones awoke him from the short, much-needed rest, he got the message, got on his feet slowly, and walked slowly away, wondering if there was any "safe" place in the area for him to rest, away from such animals. He was dead tired and needed a longer rest.

He walked as far away from them as he could get, found himself at the furthest southern end of Long beach, and dove into the sand near the edge of the plants, under the cover of the corner of the beach and some picnic tables. It was just about 40 meters from the last of the stone pavilions, where the rest-rooms were located. He couldn't hold it back, dove into the sand in the cover of the plants, and fell asleep.

He awoke later, in the early morning, into another strange and mysterious

Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, and thought he might have been the last man on Earth.

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Chapter 13: A Day in the Twilight Zone of the Outer Limits *

The following story was recorded in the early 1990s, and it was based upon the factual events of a day and a very real episode experienced by Ren Tenrut, aka Zek Stone, in 1984, while homeless in Los Angeles, California. To this day, it remains a mystery like something out of the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.

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One

Ren Tenrut was an unfortunate failure of a man, homeless, hungry, and barely surviving, when he awoke on the beach, in southwestern Los Angeles, one day in the late spring of 1984. He got a drink of water from the local pavilion, sat on one of the picnic tables for a short spell, and looked inland.

It was strangely vacant of any sign of life. There wasn't a single automobile on the roadways and not a single sign of any human life whatsoever as far as his eyes could see.

Ren was somewhat puzzled by the lack of life, but his reaction to it, from the perspective of a man that had nothing to lose to begin with anyhow, was more of fascination than fear of an unknown. Ren was fascinated by the ‘prospect’ that he was one of the last remaining humans on Earth.

For Ren was not wealthy in the least, but perhaps as poor and desperate as a man could get. In fact, all that he owned was the rags he had on and a small pocketjackknife that he found useful for survival purposes.

As Ren took the walk inland to L.A., through the wide industrial zone, he was oblivious to the idea of doomsday. He was in fact, completely fascinated by it. For to the poor, penniless, worthless Ren, it meant that all the cruel competition for property and food was gone and he was free to enjoy it all without worry, free to claim a luxurious Beverly Hills mansion, free to raid the malls and supermarkets, free to collect motorcycles, guns, and cars.

But as he walked along the road, which was aligned by high, steel, wire fences and noted the security locks intact, he had some vague, apprehensive doubts. Ren was actually a very smart guy, in things of a scientific nature. He was also a lover of science fiction, and his instincts told him that he could not be certain what had happened and if, as he suspected, indeed all the people were gone.

A side of him thought it was too good to be true, that even though he had not seen a single soul for several kilometers and about 4 hours, this did not necessarily mean they were all gone. What if only the ones in the industrial zone were gone? What if the place had been evacuated due to a gas-leak or accident of similar hazardous levels?

He stopped at a junction, looked down along the high, fence-lined streets in four directions and wondered if such was the case. He sniffed the air but detected no odors. He felt his stomach grumble for food, noted a restaurant, and peaked in

through the windows.

Even if there had been such a hazard, he realized, it would be standard procedure for a crew in safety suits to investigate it. Where were they? He saw no sign of such a crew. Were they already on the scene of the accident, lost somewhere amidst the real industrial vats and pipe works?

His stomach grumbled again. He tried the door. It was locked. Ren shook his head in frustration. He was not a thief. He was not a criminal. He hated prison. He hated it so much he never resorted to crime. If such a hazard had occurred and there were still people out there somewhere, breaking into the restaurant could still be considered a criminal act.

“Damn-it!” he swore and decided. “Oh hell, well I’m not hungry enough to be stupid. I suppose I can keep moving and try to find out what really happened before I resort to criminal ways.”

He looked around with that old conscientious shame-faced humiliation that his mother and the church had whipped into his brain. Then he sited the gas station across the street and saw a hose.

“Might as well have some water. At least it’s still free.”

He walked across to the station, picked the hose up to his mouth and squeezed the trigger. The water was warm but it set well in his stomach, and seconds later, he was on his merry way eastward, to the grand city of L.A.

In truth, all in all, it appeared to be a nice day. The sky was clear blue; it was warm but not hot, and arid with a gentle breeze from the sea coast. Along with the possible prospect that he, ‘the meek’, had inherited the Earth, this was an area he’d never before ventured into and he found it all very interesting.

On the other hand, the industrial zone was much vaster than he expected, and the site of the high fences and concrete brick walls was getting slightly monotonous. However, when it eventually did end, he found himself in a quaint little town or villa, where the workers obviously went during their free time.

There were more restaurants and gas stations and bar-rooms, even a couple of exotic clubs that featured exotic female dancers for entertainment. He sighed as he stopped to reflect on this and noted that here too; all the places were locked up tight.

“Dang it all! What’s so fun about being the last man on Earth if I can’t even enjoy the sites and provisions?”

He stopped to rest, sat down on a bench at a bus-stop, and sighed in frustration. He thought about breaking into a place, but his conscience wouldn’t let him. There was, after all, the theory of the gas-hazard and evacuation to consider.

‘Oh well,’ he thought, ‘I’ll rest my legs and then move on. The city can’t be much further. I wish the hell I knew what happened.’

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Two

Ren moved on through the town eastward, over a bridge under which were railroad tracks, and thought he heard the sound of children playing. On the other side of the bridge he saw the remnants of a child’s bike just lying there in the bushes on the side of the road, and he looked beyond it, over the bushes, anxious to see if there were children about.

All he saw was the vacant lots of very low-class housing, the kind he didn’t think existed in the United States; extremely rundown, cheap little adobe houses of no more than 2 or 3 rooms. There were about 6 of them in the foreground, many more scattered in the distance. They were apparently ‘migrant’ workers homes, rented out by husbands and fathers, just recently from Mexico, who worked in the industrial zone.

He walked on with the near beginning of a tear of sympathy. He didn’t know which to feel sorry for, that they had to live in such poverty, or that they may

have lost the lowly, meek lives that they had. Or had they also been evacuated?

He walked on through the low-class neighborhood, feeling somber and somewhat depressed by the memories that such an area provoked. Almost a kilometer later, the houses began to get a little bigger, but it was still very lowclass.

He walked somewhat more steadily, eager to leave the depressed sites. Up a gradual slope he went, through some trees, by a few small businesses, into what appeared to be a higher class area, but without houses.

It was greener, more natural, and more pleasant to the senses. He ed a small business and a gas-station on the right and sited a picnic area on the left. It was a picnic grounds, and there still appeared to be some food on some of the tables.

He looked all about as he entered it, saw that it too was lifeless, but the trash barrels were full of colorful trash, trash that had only just been put there, and there was careless, colorful litter scattered all about, as if waiting for the caretakers to come and clean it up.

He sited some food on one of the tables, a box of fried chicken, and went to it. He was relieved to find 2 pieces of chicken still in it, along with a biscuit and coleslaw. He sat down and ate, suddenly realizing that he was very hungry. He hadn't had a decent meal for days.

As he ate, he thought he heard some voices and looked up, expecting to see children at play, but no one was there. His senses were playing tricks with his mind. He thought about it as he ate and looked about the scene.

It was odd and interesting. By the looks of it, the picnic had either occurred earlier that day and had just abruptly ended, or it had occurred yesterday and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. As he reasoned it out, he wanted to believe it had just ended.

It still appeared to be enhanced by the spiritual impressions of the people, it still gave one the feeling of the happy days of youth, the fun and games of family and friends.

He finished the chicken, carried the box with the biscuit and coleslaw, and went about the other tables looking for more. With much relief and thanks to the happy people who had the picnic, he discovered some burritos, some pie, and more chicken.

More than likely, the picnic had been yesterday and no one had gotten around to cleaning up before whatever had happened. Whatever the case, Ren was glad they had left some food for him.

As he sat and ate, he kept wondering where everyone had gone and what had happened and every now and then, he half expected to look up across the picnic grounds and see someone there, as if it was just another day like any other. He sat at the table alone and ate, finally filling himself and taking his time.

It was all so strange, so very bizarre in a fascinating way. There he was, completely and utterly alone, perhaps the last man on Earth, yet it was as if the people were still about, in a spiritual form that he could not see or touch.

It was as if they were there, displaced in time, by merely a second. It was as if he felt their presence, but when he looked at where he thought they might be, the second had ed and they were gone.

The day was sunny and pleasant, as it had been yesterday, and there were echoes of the picnic still hanging about in the ethers. He became slightly sad and stopped eating.

For almost 2 years he had been a lone drifter; a homeless, family-less, friendless nobody, and now he felt a touching deep sadness that his life had taken such a sorry course. In his youth he had been to such picnics, and now, they seemed so distant as to be gone forever, along with all the good spirits that went with them.

For a minute, he almost cried, but he got suddenly tough and reminded himself how cruel the world had been, after the picnic days of youth. Picnics were for children and adults lucky enough to survive the chaotic mind-games and deceptive hypocrisies of the real world. He had not been so lucky. He was a casualty, a victim, and it did no good to cry.

He searched about the grounds and tables for more food, filled a box, stuck it in a bag, and hit the road again. He thanked the picnic spirits as he left, resuming a more positive air of neutral confidence and certain direction. If he encountered no one in the big city, then he’d be in more of a position to do something, as there were some public facilities there that were usually always open.

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Three

Ren had plenty of energy now that his stomach was full, thanks to the picnic remnants. He walked on along the tree-lined road, ed what appeared to be a high-tek, pollution-free factory, probably the kind that assembled computers, and reached a crossroads with another gas-station and restaurant.

Ahead was a junkyard on the left and on the right what appeared to be either an old, well-cared for private, corporate laboratory, or some kind of government building. It was made of stone masonry, surrounded by a metal-wire fenced-in lawn of very green grass, with sprinklers going, and boasted a proud American flag up high on a tall, metal pole, flapping in the gentle breeze.

In the midst of the industrial zone, it was a grandiose reminder of a proud American heritage and a strong work ethic. It was probably some kind of labor department, but he couldn’t quite make out the sign across the lawn near the steps and didn’t really care.

It did, however, puzzle him somewhat to see the sprinklers still going. Would not they shut them off during an evacuation, or were they on an auto-timer and they just forgot about it?

He walked across the street, toward the sprinklers, suddenly realizing it was a hot day and he had built up quite a thirst since the picnic grounds. He walked across a set of railroad tracks that aligned the street on the right, to the fenced-in lawn.

One of the sprinklers was located just inside the fence and some of the water was spraying through it. He felt the heat of the day as the sun climbed through highnoon, and bent over to catch the spray in his face.

He opened his mouth and wet his tongue, but the spray was too light for a good swallow. He stood up and wiped his face and thought about a way to get a better drink. By the railroad tracks he found an empty coke bottle, with the cap still intact. He picked it up, noted it was not old or dirty, and stepped back to the fence.

Ren had lived long enough on the streets as a homeless wanderer to know that he had to make the best of what he could find. He squatted down by the fence, took the cap off the bottle, and reached his fingers in through the wire fence. He managed to turn the head of the sprinkler about so that the main stream of water went through it.

He washed the bottle out, filled it, took a couple of swigs, filled it again, then stood up and replaced the cap, letting the sprinkler head return to its original direction. He smiled at how wonderful such simple pleasures in life seemed to make such a big difference to survival. Now he had food and water.

He looked ahead, into the distance, and saw the old central court L.A. tower peaking out over the factories and other structures in the foreground. The tower was quite a distance, just how far he was not sure, perhaps several kilometers, maybe more. It was quite a picture, especially in light of the unusual situation. He took another drink, and then began walking again.

As the old factory walls surrounded him on both sides and the tall L.A. courttower appeared to be almost straight ahead, set just slightly to the left of the street in the distance, he recalled the old sci-fi disaster classic, ‘The Omega Man’.

If he was the last man on Earth, what would he find in the walls of the big city? He was slightly chilled to think of the possible dangers, but reminded himself that the Omega Man was just science fiction, not reality.

He tried to dismiss the ghoulish thoughts, but the grey walls around him didn’t help much. Nevertheless, he moved on, committed to carry the adventure through regardless of the unknown dangers.

He had to find out everything he could, and at the ‘courts’ of L.A., he felt certain he could learn more. He took consolation in the fact that if things were as bad as he feared, he could start to exploit the resources for the sake of survival. The Omega Man would do no less.

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Four

Ren walked and walked for hours eastward along what appeared to be one of the longest and straightest streets in Los Angeles. He ed kilometers of factories, encountered an occasional gas-station and garage, usually at intersections and crossroads, and continued to see the tall court tower in the distance. It was the best landmark he had to guide him, for the area he was in he had never ed through, to his knowledge, ever before in his lifetime and he had no map to go by.

It was about as grey and gloomy as it could get on such a bright, warm, sunny summer day. There were no trees or plant life, save for an odd growth of weeds in the corner of an intersection and a rare bush inside the fence outside a factory building.

He stopped to rest after his legs complained of being tired, but only after he located a rare bench at a bus stop at one of the crossroads. He took a drink, gazed all about, at the vacant gas station, through the tightly locked gate of a factory, and wondered still if he really was alone amidst it all or if there were others hiding away behind locked doors inside some of the buildings.

He looked into the distance at the great court tower and tried to guess how far it was away, how much further he had to go. He took another drink of water, which was by this time getting warm from the heat of the day, and marveled with sci-fi fascination at the thought of being the last man on Earth.

In an ironic kind of way, he had been like that now for almost 2 years, ever since he lost touch with his family and friends and took to the road as a poor, homeless wanderer. He was anxious to get to the courts and discover the truth.

In his sorry, misanthropic way, he actually was hoping he was alone, that it would stay this way, for when he recalled how it had been with all the people, he was convinced, at least for himself, that it could only be an improvement.

After all, to the populated world he had been judged a useless bum and a loser, and discarded like a piece of waste by society. But under the circumstances of a depopulated world, he could be anyone he wanted to be: a wealthy playboy with a fancy sport-car, a powerful gunslinger on a motorbike, even a king with in a Beverly Hills castle.

Yes, he really was anxious to know the truth. He rubbed his legs, took another swig of water, got on his feet, and continued on along the old grey, industrial zone road. The first thing he had to do, if it was as he hoped, was get a set of wheels. The walking was getting tiresome.

With persistence and anticipation to discover the truth, he continued on. He ed by more factories and about a kilometer later, reached a town-square with a department store, shops, restaurants, hotels, and a grocery store.

In the center of it all was a park with 100 meters of trees and grass, aligned on two sides by a parking-lot. He stopped in one corner as he entered, looked all about for signs of life, and saw nobody, not a thing in motion. It was deserted like everything else.

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Five

Ren looked into the structure closest to him, through a set of glass doors, and saw it was a grocery store. The thought of all that food with no one to claim it made him step up to the doors and try to get in. But it was locked, like every thing else. He looked in upon the food with growing temptation, then sighed in frustration, and went to a bench on the street side and sat down.

The town was locked up tight and vacant, like everything. What a shame he could not overcome his conscience, break into some place, stake a claim and enjoy it. But the evacuation theory still took precedence over all else, and he would simply have to wait until he reached the courts and continue to resist temptation.

As he sat on the street bench and sighed with wonder, he felt as if strange eyes were spying upon him from the buildings. That was how it was with his conscience.

Whenever he had the urge to act upon temptation and commit a sinful, criminal act, it was as if there were eyes spying upon him and traps getting ready to snare him, if he did so, causing him, the poor, innocent victim, to play the prey. Because his fear of imprisonment was so strong, he was forced to resist such temptation.

As it was, after all, he was free. True, he was penniless, poor, in need of a shower, a safe place to sleep, and a new set of clothes, but at least he was free. That much, he decided, was enough to keep him from stealth and other criminal ways.

For sure, he decided without a doubt, being free was by far superior to being imprisoned like a slave and whipped to work by gun-toting masters, even if it meant sleeping outside under the stars and scavenging for food outside restaurants and going without a shower for days or even weeks.

He opened his bag of food, picked out a burrito and ate it, and once again became fascinated by yet another possible post-disaster scene.

As he looked across the square upon the many small businesses, hotels, and shops, he noted the fact that there were not very many vehicles. There were about 4 in the parking-lot at the center and 3 or 4 elsewhere, parked outside

buildings, on the streets and in between buildings.

Of course, if the disaster occurred during the early hours of the morning, before sunrise, that was not so unusual, since most of the people would have probably been at home in their private residences, outside of the town-square, at that particular time.

On the other hand, the lack of vehicles also ed the evacuation theory, as it would have been necessary for the people to use them for the quickest escape.

Then he recalled one of the most recent speculative science-fiction theories about ‘nuclear devices’ under research by the military and became very suspicious. The device was known as the ‘neutron bomb’. The neutron bomb, it was said, was designed to eliminate all human or animal life which was exposed to it, without the physical destruction of property.

‘Dear God,’ he thought, ‘was that what happened? But if so, why was he, alone, still alive? Why didn’t the neutron bomb eliminate him also?’

He was puzzled and uncertain. Was he somehow protected from the bomb’s effect by his location at the time? He recalled he had slept on the beach last night. Was he protected somehow by the salty air or some other such unknown element present at the time? He again became anxious to know the truth, arose from the bench, and moved on.

No matter what the case was, Ren was fascinated. This experience was truly the most exciting adventure of his life, and seemed to make up for everything else that had gone wrong. For a poor, homeless, friendless nobody, who had known more than his share of desperation, his spirit was high.

He was excited at the possibility of being one of the "last men on Earth" and wondered where it would lead him.

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Six

Ren walked on. On the other side of the town-square he ed a large warehouse on the left and a village of small, modern, low-income houses on the right. The houses had small yards but plenty of trees, bushes, and colorful flowering plants. Compared to the houses he’d seen on the edge of the refinery, these were luxuries, but at the same time, it was obvious they were still small and low-class. Upper-lower class houses, if one could imagine such a thing.

He didn’t stop to observe more closely, and around 100 meters later, the village ended at the edge of a highway over. He walked under the over, read some of the graffiti on the cement and concrete walls (the name Lefty was most prominent), and found himself at the urban edge of the big city, on the other side of the highway.

He walked on with more caution as he observed perhaps the most colorless area he’d ever seen yet. Old, tall, 10 to 20 level buildings with lots of windows, many of them boarded up, were everywhere, on every corner, taking up as much space on the blocks as possible.

In between the massive old structures were narrow alleys of concrete cracked in a thousand ways and a couple of old small parking lots, half dirt and dust, with old, run-down, rusty automobile wrecks, skeletons of a past era of progress, biting the dust and past their time.

The only color there appeared to be were faded signs and commercial ads in the dusty windows of ground-level little convenient stores and seedy little dives. The overall impression was various shades of gray, like an old newspaper.

There were no trees whatsoever, absolutely no green plants, the place reminded him of the exhaust chamber of a giant engine, or the filter way of a giant airconditioner, and it was in a desperate need of a cleaning. The liveliest thing about it was the paper litter on the streets, caught in a warm, little breeze from the highway under.

He walked on, acting more and more like the Omega man with the seconds. The blue sky was so obscured by the tall grey buildings that it appeared grey also. He wondered what time it was and guessed it to be going on into the late afternoon, maybe around 4 pm.

He felt oddly brave but a little naked, like the gunslinger without his guns, as he walked on towards his destination, through a section of old L.A. that he suspected would be seething with cops and cons, undercover detectives, and prostitutes, if it were an ordinary day.

But ordinary it was not. It was so dead and vacated that by this time he really was beginning to suspect the worse. Was it the neutron bomb or an emergency evacuation?

Of course, the fact that he had never, to his recollection, ever ed through these parts before (even though he did experience many odd feelings of deja vu), made him wonder if maybe it was dead like this on particular days of the week or month, in which case it would not be all that extraordinary after all.

This lack of knowledge added to the uncertainty and mystery, but told him nothing. There was one place just a few blocks away, however, that he felt certain would tell him something more definite. That place was the main street bus terminal. If the bus terminal was vacant, then it would be almost certain a major disaster had occurred.

He moved on with certitude, anxious to reach the terminal and get some answers. It wasn’t so far now, just a few blocks away.

In the next block, outside a restaurant, he came upon his first glimpse of real color in the old grey section yet. A small patch of cherry tomatoes was growing in the dusty dirt between the building and the sidewalk.

The little, round, red fruits were quite friendly and inviting amidst this great, colorless space. He picked one for good luck, tossed it into his mouth, and moved on again with the same simple pleasure he’d felt with the sprinklers outside the industrial labor department.

He stopped on the corner of the next block and heard music coming from the left. It was barely audible, but it was the first sign of life he’d encountered yet. He looked about, trying to recall if he should turn left now or go on to the next block. He decided it didn’t matter, since if he was wrong he could simply use the next street over and turn right. Either way, it was the right general direction, and besides, he wanted to check out the source of the music.

He turned left and walked in the direction of the music. As he walked, it gradually became louder. He crossed a street and on the next block, discovered the source. It was coming from a small bar-cafe in the ground-level of another old, multi-level structure. He peaked in through the window, saw nothing, and then tried the door. It was locked tight, as he half expected.

He looked in through the window for about a minute and studied the interior of the place. It was a quaint, seedy little t. He saw no one; it appeared vacant like everything else. Apparently, someone had left the radio on. But if the radio was still playing music, didn’t that mean there were still people alive?

Not necessarily. He knew there were some stations that used automatic recordings which were timed to play whether or not a DJ was on duty. Such appeared to be the case. Someone had left a radio on and it was still playing automatic music. As he turned away and continued on, he sited the bus terminal just 2 blocks away on the right. Finally, he’d get some answers.

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Seven

Ren walked on with his eyes fixed ahead towards the terminal. It looked as vacant as everything else, but it was possible there were people inside. As he crossed the street from left side to right, still 2 blocks away, another man appeared, much to his cool fascination, from the street to the left. He slowed down but kept his surprise in reserve. So someone else had survived after all?

The man was heading in the same direction as it turned out, and very gently, reflecting Ren's same cool air of introverted fascination, walked up beside him and said, “Say brother, I know where we can get some free food. Have you got a knife?”

Ren maintained his cool repose, reached in to his pants pocket, and removed perhaps the most valuable possession he owned, a small, pocket jack-knife. He stopped walking, looked at the guy, judged the man friendly with swift intuition, and handed the jack-knife to him.

The man received it, gave a slight nod, and motioned across to the corner lot of the next block before the terminal. There was a dumpster overflowing with crates and discarded fruits and vegetables.

“They throw the stuff they don’t sell out at the end of the day,” he said, as he led Ren to the pile. “But some of it is still good to eat, if you get to it early enough.”

He stopped by the pile, bent over, pulled out a large cantaloupe melon, squatted down, placed it on the stone pavement, and used the knife to cut it into pieces. He wiped the knife off on his pant-leg, closed it, handed it back to Ren, and took a bite of the melon. He stood up, handed a piece to Ren, Ren accepted it with thanks, and they both walked on, in the same direction, to the terminal. Ren was not very hungry, but the other man was, and he ate some nonetheless.

Behind the calm, cool-like cover, Ren wanted to exchange information with the man, but he did not get the chance to formulate the right words. They walked and ate, and a minute later, they arrived at the terminal.

“Stay cool, brother,” the man said, and quickly disappeared inside.

When Ren followed with more caution, he saw the man nowhere, as if he had just vanished on the other side of the door. Ren stayed cool, as the man suggested, and walked up a few steps, to another set of doors, opened them, and

stepped inside the terminal’s main lobby.

To his cool, emotionless surprise, there were others inside, but only a handful. It was by no means a busy day. Some of the ones sitting in the seats closest to the entrance looked up, with faraway glints of mixed wonder and confusion. Some of them looked quite lost.

He recalled the fact that he hadn’t washed for days and went directly to the restrooms. Suddenly self-conscious of his ragged appearance, he went directly to a sink and looked into a mirror. The reflection that looked back was somewhat shocking.

There was so much dust and dirt on his face he could have ed for an Indian or African. His hair was tied back in a ponytail but still a mess of loose hair and frizzy split-ends. He had the beginning of a beard and moustache, but with all the dirt, it hardly showed.

Along with all that, his shirt and pants were dirty, dusty rags. He washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and when he was done, discovered that a good portion of the dirt had actually been a deep suntan.

As a result, he still resembled a dark-skinned Indian, and that seemed cool, because he’d always respected the Indians. He walked to the water-fountain, got a drink, and left the restroom refreshed and relieved.

His legs were weary and he needed to rest. He went to the closest seat and sat down, anxious to think about the day and what the situation was all about. Unfortunately, his need to rest his legs overcame his gentler discretions, and a couple of people closest to him looked at him with disgust, and he heard someone whisper, to his immovable fascination, “It’s a bomb!”

He wasn’t sure how to interpret this, but seconds later, 2 security guards began walking toward him. They were staring straight at him, and one was talking into a radio-unit.

Ren quickly assessed the situation and guessed that the 2 guards were planning to capture him and throw him out of the terminal, as they so often did to ‘loiterers’ without tickets.

“Damn it all!” he cursed, and arose on his weary, tired legs, and walked with some reluctance to the doors.

“What the hell’s their problem?” he said to himself, stepping out onto the street. “Can’t a guy get a little rest? There weren’t even more than ten people in the place anyhow!”

He thought of the park benches about the public service courts, several blocks away, and slowly but surely made his way for them, thinking now only about

getting off his feet and resting for a spell.

As he made his way along the deserted, lifeless old city street, for the courts and the park benches, dusk descended.

There still were no people outside, no vehicles, and no life. It was strange that there should only be a handful of people inside the terminal and absolutely no one else outside. But by this time, Ren was just too tired to think about it.

It took him longer than he would have expected to reach the courtyards. His legs complained in pain and his feet were dragging through invisible glue the whole time.

When he finally reached the courtyards, he got a drink from one of the public fountains, and had his choice of a dozen benches within the fresh, well-kept garden of a courtyard. Seconds later, he finally was free to rest, off his feet, at last, and reflect upon the mysterious day without any fear of private security guards.

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Eight

Ren sat on a bench at the colorful court yard, completely alone amidst the descending night. He felt relief to be off his feet and resting.

‘What a day it had been’, he thought, and wondered. ‘What a fascinating day.’

Seeing the handful of people at the terminal, and especially the pushy securityguards, had somehow destroyed his fantasy of being the last man on Earth, and now he was just too tired to contemplate it.

Nonetheless, as he sat there alone, still wondering where all the people were, the little Omega man inside him felt some disappointment, and tried to pretend, under the circumstances, that most of the people really were gone, and tomorrow the world would be just as vacant as today.

He slept on the bench that night, and the next day, his dreams were terminated. The city slowly, but surely, came alive again, repopulated again and back to ‘normal’. Unable to forget yesterday’s mystery, he decided to himself, ‘There’s got to be a story in it somewhere.’

finis

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* This story was taken from the "even" chapters of the science-fiction shortstory, "The Master Projector", originally written in the early 1990s by this author, Nick Zentor, as a way to record the factual events of one of the strangest days ever experienced by the man, while homeless in Los Angeles, California, in 1984. "The Master Projector" story was also written as a form of speculative science-fiction, in an attempt to make a wildly original and unique sciencefiction fantasy out of the mystery of that day, while following the actions of the man who had the experience.

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Chapter 14: 1985 - 1990: An Ambition to Work for in a Loveless Purgatory

Zek Stone recalled the time when he made the decision to leave the west coast and return to the east coast, as he recorded it in his journal:

Appx. 1985-02-27:

The Flying Stone Experience

"In the late winter and early spring of 1985, I sat on the back of a beach in Malibu, and contemplated swimming out to sea and not turning back, as an escape from the loveless purgatory I had fallen into. There was a stone at the back of the beach, at the base of a hillside covered by stones, which made a perfect place for sitting.

"I sat there and stared out at the wide, deep blue sea and the lighter blue sky over it, wondering how far I could get before being unable to swim any further. Then I thought about the actual plunge under, into the deep blue, and how i would deal with my lungs filling with water.

"Someone had once said that it was one of the easier ways to go and I wondered how true it was.

"As I sat there, staring out into the wide blue and contemplating the ultimate act of desperation, something very extraordinary occurred. It was as if everything had suddenly become speeded up in time, like it shifted into a higher gear or something. Suddenly, the clouds in the sky looked like great stone islands and I was flying through a field of them, in another dimension.

"My back was against the stone as I was suspended in flight, like being on a small stone island or something and shooting through a field of larger stone islands. It was such an amazing experience, like something I had never experienced before. It was so amazing, my eyes and my mind were completely transfixed and suspended, trying to make out some of the details on the stone islands as I was ing.

"I had completely forgotten about where i was before, on Malibu beach. I was on one of the wildest rides I had ever been on and I couldn't think of anything else. I wondered where I was while taking as much of it as I could in. The islands were ing by me as the stone I was on went shooting through the field of islands.

"It wasn't like being on the sea on earth, it was like being in another dimension, where there were islands of stone in 3 dimensions, rather than just on a single plane. It was like being in an asteroid field, only within some kind of environment like the atmosphere of earth, not outer space.

"It was like one of the wildest amusement park rides in the multiverse. It was also like one of the most amazing spiritual experiences I ever had. I'm not sure how long it went on exactly, maybe an hour or two, but when it was over, I wasn't thinking about taking that swim to Hawaii any more.

"When I stood up from that amazing stone ride through another dimension, I felt a surge of confidence that convinced me I could do almost anything I wanted to do.

"I had started writing a science-fiction story in a notebook that I had kept with me in a bag. I took a look at it, decided I wanted to be a science-fiction writer, and wondered how to do it. In the end, I could think of no where else to turn to help but mother.

"There was nothing for me in southern California. No where to turn to, at the time, for help. I needed a place to plug a typewriter in, so I had to return to the east coast.

"It was a big decision that I sometimes tend to regret. If it weren't for the fact that I had to recover lost memories from before the accident in 1982, memories which have exposed step-brother as a gas-lighting pathological liar, I might have preferred taking that swim to Hawaii.

"Working too hard for too long under pressure makes taking that swim to Hawaii look like a vacation."

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Appx: 1985-03-01:

After Ren returned to his "home-town" on the east coast, in New England, he had no where to turn to but his mother for help. So, he met with his mother at the old house on Meadow street, in Mawaga, where he had spent his youth. He agreed to the mother's , and planned to get a haircut and a job, in exchange for his old room. The step-father pretended to go along, while suppressing his own highly prejudicial thoughts about Ren, in the background.

Ren didn't know it at the time, but his step-father was fairly well convinced that Ren was not simply a bastard, but everything bad that the younger "junior" Jarges had suggested: stupid, weak, slow upstairs, unable to grow up and be a "responsible" playboy-gigolo, like Jarges junior, and to top it all off, apparently, from what the spoiled-brat son of Satan claimed, also a "gay weak-link".

Ren was a victim, at the time, not just of a motorcycle accident and temporary "general memory-loss", but he was a victim of the lies of the step-brother, Jarges. He didn't know it at the time, but everyone in the family and the towncommunity that knew who Ren was had actually had their minds corrupted by the step-brother's lies, and everyone looked at Ren like some kind of joke to be laughed at, not as a man or individual deserving equal respect.

The step-father actually had no real respect for Ren whatsoever because he simply couldn't get over the idea that Ren was "gay", "stupid", and "weak", all according to the lies of his spoiled-brat junior name-sake, aka "the son of Satan".

Of course, the low-IQ moron of a step-father who believed all of his favorite little spoiled-brat junior name-sake's lies saw no problem treating the "bastard" of the family exactly the way those lies dictated.

The old guy saw no problem there. In fact, the whole conspiracy to gas-light Ren into slave-like submission with the step-brother's lies worked out very well for both of them, in the end.

Jarges senior wanted his junior name-sake to be the next playboy millionaire and using Ren as a scapegoat and fool to take all of the blame for anything that went wrong worked out quite well for them for the first 25 years.

So Jarges junior lied about Ren. He fed excuses to Jarges senior for punishing Ren and treating him like the bastard he already suspected he was.

Apparently, the old man was willing to go along with giving Ren another chance, in 1985, more or less, but as it turned out, he simply couldn't get over that lie that led him to think of Ren as a "gay weak-link" in the family.

One night, as Ren was working over the kitchen stove, the old man suddenly snuck up on him from behind. Ren heard him and spun about, just in time to catch him, standing there, staring at Ren with wide eyes and a twisted, porky pig smile.

"What do you want?" Ren said to him, as he froze like that, and the man's twisted smile quickly turned into a frown. He turned about, went back to his room, on the other side of the kitchen, and Ren tried to forget about it.

In retrospect, Ren suspected the old man had made an attempt to "molest" him in some way, from behind, and Ren had detected the motion and stopped it. It was very odd and at the time, he didn't know what to make of it.

At the time, Ren's memory hadn't yet recovered all of the details about his past, from before the accident in late 1982, and he had completely forgotten about the "gay-lie" that his step-brother spread about him, in the late 70s.

Shortly after the odd incident with the step-father, they got into a fight, and Ren had to leave.

It was late in March of 1985, almost a month after he had returned home. There was still some snow on the ground when Ren left the house. His mother tried to keep him from going, but he looked at the old man, then looked at her, and said, "I can't stay here with him. He hates me. I'm leaving."

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Zek recalled the time when he was homeless in the late winter and early spring of 1985.

"I stayed under one of the local bridges, on the other side of the "tributary" from the Connecticut river, outside of Mawaga. From there, I could see the other side, where the woodlands were, between the river and the street where the old house was, in Mawaga.

"I knew it was late in the winter, heading into April, and I hoped that we didn't get hit by another snowstorm, in anticipation of the warm, spring weather. I didn't know what to do except survive until the weather warmed up and it wasn't so cold at night.

"I can't recall how I did it exactly, but it wasn't easy. I found that it was somewhat easier to sleep under the bridge during the day, because it wasn't too cold, but even then, things didn't work out too well.

"I decided to treat the bridge as my "home-base", because it was close enough to the old house in Mawaga so that I could sneak back and see my mother if I wanted to, when the old man was out. But I had to find some kind of help, and i knew it, so once I had enough rest, I went out to the big city during the day, seeking some kind of help.

"There was a "homeless" shelter, across from the main bus station in the city. I went there and tried to get help and I was rejected, because according to the people there, I had "relatives" in the area who could help me, and they could only help "homeless" people who had no relatives in the area who could help.

"I had to laugh, without humor, as I left the place. They had no idea what kind of "animals" the "relatives" I had in the area were.

"I was so frustrated, after that, that I accidentally banged on a door to a place that I thought was abandoned (it looked like it was), and a stranger suddenly opened it, much to my surprise, and said, "Are you crazy? What do you want?"

"I apologized shortly, said, "Sorry, wrong door," and moved along before things turned ugly.

"Well, I was homeless for about a month, more or less, but I managed somehow. I had 2 things going for me: the warming weather of early spring, and my ability to sneak back into the old house, through the "back door", when the old man was away at work for the day.

"There were times of the day when the step-father was away, working, and I had a good idea what those hours were, so I snuck through the back "woods", near the highway which led to the bridge. There was an old farm-house, or at least, the foundation to an old farm-house, on a small plot of land across from the side-street where the old house was located.

"I had to sneak through the overgrown woodland about the old farm-house,

through the backyard of a red-brick local worker's union club, where there was a parking-lot and some kind of small court where they pitched horse-shoes or something, which hadn't been used in years and was overgrown with weeds.

"From the other side of the red-brick club, in the northwest corner, I spied to see if the old man's car was in the driveway, and if it wasn't, it meant he was gone to work, and it was okay for me to sneak into the house.

"I did so, almost every day, because I had no money and needed something to eat, for almost a month, as the winter was near its end in late March and April. As it turned out, the mother was also away at her work, when I did so.

"But one day, mother came home while I was there and caught me stealing food in the kitchen. She was surprised to see me, and I reacted quite defensively.

"Where is he? He isn't coming home now, is he?" I said to her.

"He's at work," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Getting something to eat," I said to her. "I don't want him to see me. He thinks I'm a bastard. He hates me!"

Mother didn't know what to say.

I looked at her with suspicion, and said, "You hate me too, don't you? Everyone in the family hates me! Everyone thinks I'm a bastard!"

"No," she said, with a look of fear on her face, as I stepped over to the kitchen table where she was standing, frozen with the fear.

Apparently, I was so mad at the time, that she feared I would become violent with her, and she fell slowly down, into one of the chairs at the table, dropped her head, and began to cry.

I mellowed as she sobbed, with her head down, and said, "I'm sorry, mom. I don't want to hurt you. I just don't know what to do. I ... don't know..."

I consoled her shortly, to let her know I didn't mean to hurt her, put some food in a bag, and left.

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Ren spent days under the bridge, just surviving on the food and drink he had taken from the house. He seethed in anger towards his step-brother and step-

father, as his mind began to recall some of the details of the memory he had lost, from before the accident in late 1982.

He knew the old man thought Ren was a bastard, and he recalled that the two of them, senior and junior Jarges, had both ganged up on him more than a few times, usually after the junior had lied about Ren in some way.

Ren recalled a memory from his childhood, about something that occurred on Christmas. He had just opened one of his presents. It was some kind of toy. The memory was so obscure he couldn't recall what the toy was, only that he liked it, and shortly after he started playing with it, Jarges suddenly took it from him and intentionally broke it, right in front of him.

He reported the incident to the parents, who were just on the other side of the living-room at the time, but didn't see what had happened.

"Jarges broke my toy!" Ren reported to them.

"It was an accident!" Jarges said, much to Ren's surprise. He knew it wasn't and Jarges was obviously lying.

"He's lying!" Ren insisted, "I saw him break it!"

"No, it was an accident," Jarges said.

"Ren, stop blaming your brother," mother said. "If it was an accident, it's not his fault."

"Huh?" Ren said.

There was nothing he could do about it. The parents let the matter go, and Jarges was off the hook completely. Ren had seen him intentionally break the toy, right in front of him, and he had lied to cover it up and get away with it. Furthermore, the parents had bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker.

Ren was shocked and couldn't believe it was happening.

Jarges looked at him with an evil smile. It wasn't the first time Jarges had done something like that to him, but the memory was so obscure that he could see nothing beyond it. It was like a sharp island of color within his memory, which became lost within the sea of past time, such that he wasn't even sure what year it was.

One thing he was sure of, it had occurred at their suburban house in Mawaga,

which meant it was some time after 1967. Ren may have been no more than 8 or 9 years old at the time, in only the third or fourth grade.

Ren recalled how the junior Jarges had treated him, as he thought about his past, while staying under the bridge. Whether or not he realized it, the details of his memory were being suppressed, not simply because of the PTSD from the accident, but from 20 years of gas-lighting violations, instigated by his stepbrother, the junior Jarges, and ed by the step-father, the senior Jarges.

He knew, after recalling the details of the memory about the incident at Christmas, when Jarges intentionally broke his toy, and denied it after the fact, that the junior Jarges hated him. The evil, sadistic smile Jarges was wearing after that incident told Ren all he needed to know. Jarges junior was an evil stepbrother who hated him and hurt him, many times in the past.

How had he gotten away with it? Simple. He lied. He denied doing anything wrong to Ren, and without any witnesses to take sides with Ren and the truth, the step-father chose to take sides with the big liar, the spoiled-brat son of Satan who hated Ren, Jarges junior.

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One day in early May, Ren ran into his mother, while he was sneaking in for food and water at the old house. She knew he was doing it by then and didn't hold it against him. If she had told the old man about it, she didn't say so. Ren didn't think that she did tell him, because he trusted her not to do so. But the truth was, he was simply trusting her because he had no one else in the world he

could trust at the time.

This time, she had some good news for him. She told him that the manager of the store she worked for needed someone to work in the hardware and the stockroom. Ren knew how badly he needed the job, and went for it.

"What about a place to stay?" he said.

"You can have your old room," she said, "but once you start working, you'll have to pay rent. We'll work something out."

"What about step-father?" he said, wondering how the old man could tolerate such a situation, with a "bastard" son living in the house again.

"Don't worry about your father," she said.

Ren hated the way she insinuated that the old man was "his" father, when Ren knew well enough that the old guy hated Ren and thought of him as a bastard.

"He's agreed to let you stay, as long as you have a job and pay the rent," she said.

So, Ren went to work at the department store and his luck began to change.

The problem with too many people, Zek Stone reflected, while thinking back upon the time, was that they were too easily corrupted by the lies of evil stepbrothers, and they didn't know how to see through some of the most obvious stereotypes, and give others some credit for individuality.

When it pertained to most general labor work, individuality was coldly subjected to stereotypes, simply because the work itself was so robotic that there was no "individual", just a robot, just as there was no "i" in "team".

When most common human minds mixed the lies of evil step-brothers with the knack humans had for stereotyping, Ren found himself playing somewhat of an unexpected role, as the very first "male" clerk at the department store.

He actually did not even know it at the time. He didn't find out about this little known fact until after he took the job, and it began to sink in.

He knew that he was the only "male" clerk at the department store at that time, once he counted all of the heads to the regular crew of clerks and saw that they were all women. But what he learned later was that they never actually had a "male" clerk at the department store before, and he was actually the first.

"What about Ed?" he said to Charlene, the young brunette clerk he had befriended, while they were working together with the stocks in the petdepartment.

"Ed is just the cleaner," she said. "He's not a clerk."

"Oh, so I'm the very first "male" clerk," he said, "this store has ever had? That's hard to believe."

"No it isn't," she itted, sincerely. "You are the first "male" clerk the old man has ever hired."

He reflected upon that for a moment. By the old man, she meant the manager, he guessed. She could have been right.

There were about 7 or 8 women working at the store; some of them near retirement age, some were middle-aged, and a couple were younger, like just out of high school, such as Charlene and Dorene. Aside from his mother, who worked in the back office, there was just the manager himself, and Ed, who did the cleaning.

Later, he talked with Charlene again, and she wondered why he was working there. She itted that she thought it wasn't the kind of job most men wanted to do, and that was when he told her about his ambition to be a science-fiction writer.

"I just need a job to pay the rent, and keep my typewriter plugged in," he explained. "I'm not really planning on making this job my life-time career or anything."

It was the truth and he saw no reason to keep it from her. It was almost as if he were saying, "I need the job to pay the rent while i go to night school."

Writing science-fiction had become his night-job and his part-time weekend dayoff job. It was like "writing science-fiction was my night-school".

Nothing wrong with that. Everything was cool.

But whether Ren realized it or not, not everyone liked him as much as Charlene. Dorene was a big redhead who acted like the big sister to Charlene. They were obviously good buddies who had been working side by side in the store for perhaps a couple of years, before Ren got the job working with them.

Charlene was the nice one, but Dorene wasn't too bad, once he got used to her.

She was bossy, and liked to act like she was keeping Ren "in line", as if she were his superior, even though technically, she was just another department clerk.

But she had helped show Ren some of the ropes and simple tasks in the pet department, as an extra duty for him when she was not there, and she seemed to know about a lot of things, so Ren rightfully respected her.

But later, after speaking with the manager, he learned that Dorene wasn't supposed to be giving him orders, and it was after that when he realized the girl was just being bossy like his step-brother Jarges and actually did not have the authority to boss him around.

The only exceptions were when the manager told Dorene to something on to him, but if it was important, he wouldn't do that. If it were important, then the manager himself would it on to Ren. Like when he told her to show him how to take care of the pets.

What Ren learned was something that got lightly brushed aside at the time, but upon thinking it over, and putting the facts together, he learned that Dorene didn't really like him because she didn't think he was needed and she felt like he was pushing her out.

Apparently, when Ren got the job at the department store, Dorene was mad because she wanted the hardware department and thought she deserved it. Instead, much to her disappointment, they gave the hardware department to Ren, and she was quietly jealous.

Dorene worked in the toy department and the pet-department, but apparently, when they hired Ren, she wanted the hardware department. He didn't know that any such "competition" over different departments existed at the time, and Dorene said nothing to him about it, so he thought nothing of it. It was one of the reasons why she acted so bossy with him, but he didn't know it at the time.

Apparently, the manager caught Dorene giving him a "bad order" one day, when the man stopped him doing something and he told him that Dorene told him to do it. That was when he found out that Dorene wasn't supposed to be giving him orders to do things and apparently, she was abusing her authority.

He didn't understand what was happening at the time, but in retrospect, it looked like Dorene intentionally tried to make him look stupid somehow, by telling him to do stupid things.

After that, whenever he thought about Dorene and her general attitude around him, she reminded him of Jarges junior. The more he began to see her that way, the less he trusted her.

On the surface, in public, she was a jovial, generally likable person, the kind that liked to share a funny joke now and then to lighten the mood. From what Ren had seen of her, she was quite popular. But for some reason, she acted like Jarges, when they were working alone or just with Charlene.

For example, when they were working with Charlene, she liked to insult Ren now and then and make him feel stupid, while Charlene laughed. That was something only Jarges had done to him in the past, and he didn't like it.

That was it, he realized. It was her attitude. She was the opposite of a malechauvinist -- she was a female feminist. She was a feminist who liked to push all kinds of bad stereotypes about men that Ren felt were unfairly applied to him.

She made him feel stupid every chance she got, implied that he was a typical "male-chauvinist" who couldn't keep his mind on the work, but at the same time apparently, she simply didn't think Ren was capable of holding the job for more than a year.

Ren didn't like the way she treated him and didn't understand why she didn't like him.

What he hadn't understood at the time was the fact that the entire store of female clerks had actually agreed to treat Ren fairly, in spite of the fact that he was the son of their "acting manager", Mrs. Tenrut.

Apparently, though Ren didn't know it at the time, the fact that his mother worked in the back office, as the store's ant, and as the "acting manager" on the days when the regular manager was off, qualified as somewhat of an ethical aberration, but it wasn't a violation of the rules.

The problem wasn't the actual fact that a relative in the management office helped a relative get a job, so much as the repercussions that occurred during such situations.

For example, the possibility of favoritism. This was the problem that Dorene had with Ren. She thought that they were "playing favorites" when they let Ren take over the hardware department.

But Ren didn't know it at the time.

In 1987, Ren still had the job at the department store, much to the disappointment of Dorene.

Later that year, she was caught stealing money from the cash-. For a moment, someone thought Ren had done it, but they checked him, questioned him, and let him go. Later, they found out that Dorene had tried to steal $50.

It was an odd thing, he thought. He wondered why Dorene would try to steal $50, but had no idea at all. Then he thought it over again, realized that they had thought he had done it, and wondered about that.

Why would they think Ren had done it? He didn't know why they suspected him, but when he realized how close they came to blaming him, before he was able to exonerate himself, he saw a pattern.

It looked almost as if Dorene had stolen the money to make it look like Ren did it somehow, and failed. It was just the sort of thing Jarges might have done, only with the senior Jarges backing him up, he would have gotten away with it, and Ren would have lost the job.

Not this time. This time, the evil perpetrator was caught in the act!

Ren realized that he had just narrowly escaped playing the scapegoat again.

The very last time he saw Dorene, oddly enough, she was acting like the jovial big sister to Charlene again, and pretending the whole thing was no big deal. Later, he heard she found another job and was doing fine.

It was all very strange for Ren. He didn't even know why Dorene didn't like him and felt somehow responsible for her losing the job, as if she had made some kind of sacrifice for him.

But meanwhile, Ren had other problems. Dorene wasn't the only one who didn't like him. Word had somehow gotten around about Ren and it wasn't good, and

he didn't even know it.

Apparently, some of the local lower-class citizens within the local area of Baltic avenue in town didn't like him very much either. He had no idea why. He was just doing his job and didn't understand why some people didn't like him.

Now and then they came to the store. They browsed about and they played mind-games with him. He guessed that some of them were thieves, and the manager told him to "watch out" for thieves, and so now and then, he went about and checked out the corners, to make sure none were stealing.

Theft was a big problem for the store, up until about 1988, when they started using security stickers. Unfortunately, once they had been caught and learned about the security stickers, some of them actually had the nerve to tear them off, even if they had to tear open the package to do it. But the security stickers worked fairly well for the most part.

Ren wondered how they managed to get away with tearing the stickers off, and tearing apart the packages to do so, when there were so many clerks on the floor all the time.

In retrospect, he figured they probably worked in teams, and used one to distract the clerk, with silly questions about something, while the other(s) did the actual stealth. Ren recalled more than enough silly questions from customers during his years at the store, which kept him transfixed and distracted for minutes. During that time period, if they moved quickly, they could have done it.

No wonder they had so much cases of stolen items. It really didn't make Ren look good, since much of it was in his departments and his responsibility. It was almost as if they were stealing from them just to make him look bad. He didn't like it much.

Furthermore, many of them had very bad attitudes towards him. They treated him like a toy robot that deserved to be kicked about for the fun of it. Some of them actually insulted him behind his back, after talking to him about something, much the way Dorene or Jarges had done, insinuating that he was "stupid".

He had no idea why any of them hated him. All he wanted to do was the work he had to do, and then go back to his science-fiction stories. It was his big ambition and he just couldn't shake it. But they knew nothing about it and didn't care.

Or did they? What was it they didn't like about him? Had Charlene told Dorene about his ambition, and did she tell the others? Or was it something else? Like maybe another lie?

He tolerated them as well as possible, kept his cool, did his job, and tried to not let it worry him.

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But things got very weird later in 89.

First, there was a really dark storm that occurred during the summer, around late June or early July, in the middle of the day, while Ren was working in the back of the store. There were a few customers in the store, browsing, when it happened.

It became really dark outside, so dark, it looked like an early nightfall. Ren knew it was just a storm, with extremely heavy, thick clouds blocking out the sun, but it had to be the darkest day he had ever experienced. One of the customers, a young Latino girl, said she was scared, and Ren consoled her for a moment.

It really was quite unusual, but Ren never gave into the fear of the unknown that the others were reflecting, and simply counted the minutes into the half-hours, wondering when it would . He wasn't sure what more he could do, aside from simply keep his post, at the back of the store, where he was expected to be.

But it was one of those extremely unusual days when Ren didn't quite know what to do, because it was so unknown. For about 2 hours, at least, the customers that were there roamed about inside the store and hung out at the cafe counter, not daring to go outside into such a dark, apparently dangerous storm, while Ren's thoughts began to worry about the young Latino girl, in a bigbrotherly way.

But in spite of a growing desire to do something other than just stand about watching over the back of the store, Ren did the rather boring thing and just kept

his post through the whole dark day.

In retrospect, Ren wondered if he should have done things differently. He liked the Latino girl, for example, and thought he might have befriended her, if he tried. But he didn't, he just kept his post and never did anything out of the ordinary, in spite of it being one of the darkest days he had ever experienced.

In retrospect, Zek Stone imagined it may have been some kind of "end of the world" scenario under the powers of Light and Darkness, which might have made an interesting story or movie, for all he knew. If that were the case, then he was nothing more than the "key grip" at best, and didn't play much of a part in any of it at all.

When it was over, it was almost as if it had never happened. But Ren knew it had happened, and there were big changes around the store after it, later that year.

The manager was transferred, but Ren didn't know why. Within the next 18 months, they went through 3 different managers, all much younger than the old manager that was transferred, and in 1990, they informed all of the clerks, that they were closing at the end of the year.

The store closed at the end of 1990, and Ren was out of work again.

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In 1989, along with everything else that went weird, Ren's attempt to get his first book published failed and put him out on a crazy vacation, in August that year. He went out and got drunk and almost fell into the river, at the city riverfront park. Then he accidentally got into a short rumble with some young teenagers near the railroad tracks, on his drunken way home, and suddenly sobered up to what was happening.

"I didn't start this," he suddenly stopped and said, and withdrew from the rumble before anyone got hurt. They let him go because, he realized, they were afraid he was going to kill them, and he didn't even know it.

Somehow, his rage had exploded, when he thought one of the kids had insulted him, and his actions had turned into a rumble with them all.

He had been so mad, and he stopped, because he realized it was not like him. His rage was misdirected at strangers who had merely been making a little noise when he was ing. He had mistakenly thought they were insulting him. He had exploded, but he had sobered up suddenly on the tracks, and for a moment, it was almost as if time had been stopped.

After he rethought the situation, he realized he was wrong, said, "I didn't start this," and withdrew from the scene.

He walked along the riverside, along the path there, along the train-tracks,

outside the big city. He had sobered up and was wondering what to do with himself. He was mad because his book had failed the test for publication, and he was out $500 bucks for the deal.

That's right, it cost him $500 just to submit his manuscript for a review which decided whether or not it could be published, and he failed the review. He submitted the manuscript, failed the review, and he was out $500.

Ren felt like the biggest fool in the world again. He was embarrassed to it that he had lost $500 to a literary "super agent" who suckered him into submitting his manuscript, and all he got out of it was a couple of pages of rejection in a "book report" that Ren could have done himself in high school.

He felt foolish, and after it became obvious to him that he had no chance with Charlene, who described her boyfriend as a "skilled worker that made $25 an hour", he began to worry that he had wasted his time for nothing.

Then, in 1990, the company played musical managers for a year, and then closed the store down.

Ren declined the offer for him to work in one of the other stores, which were located in places much further away, where he had never been, because he had no automobile and didn't like the idea of depending upon public transportation.

But he had to get some kind of job, if he expected to keep a roof over his head.

Furthermore, he had to make money to pay for his books. And he had to get books published to establish himself as someone other than the typecast fool his step-brother had made him.

Ren may or may not have fully realized it at the time, because he was so busy "faking it to make it", like most everyone did, just to maintain the pretense that no matter how bad things got, he could be a good robot as well as anyone, if he had to. But he hated himself and what his step-brother's lies had made him, as far back as he could recall, ever since the spoiled-brat son of Satan began lying about Ren and having his way with everything.

Ren hated himself and hated the name he was forced to carry every where he went. He reasoned, within his own mind, that if the old man really did think he was a bastard, and treated him like a bastard, then he was a bastard, and if he was a bastard, then the name "Ren" with the "Tenrut" attached to it just didn't seem quite right to Ren. It just didn't seem quite right at all.

He wanted to change it, and that's one of the reasons why he used a "pseudonym" (Zek Stone) for writing science-fiction. But the legal name-change he needed cost between $500 and $800, at the time, from what he was told. That kind of money he did not have.

So, Ren Tenrut experienced one of the longest identity crisis any human could ever endure, between 1990 and 2020, as he worked himself to death trying to get his stories published and to make enough money to pay for the legal namechange, to escape the "gas-lighting" Tenruts and the typecast role as a bastard in the family.

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Chapter 15: 1991 - 1995: Memory Retrieved in 1994

Zek recalled what happened between 1991 and 1995:

"It wasn't until the summer of 1994 that I recalled the details of the confrontation in the kitchen with Jarges, in 1975.

"After I lost the job at the department store, I spent some time in 1991 in psychotherapy. At the time, I managed to get a job as a part-time painter with a local house-painting company.

"Some extremely bad nightmares had convinced me that I should seek some kind of help, so I located a psychotherapist in the south-side of the big city, and spent about 1 year in psychotherapy, before being informed that the psychotherapist was moving out of the state.

"When I sought some kind of better understanding of my problem, the therapist told me that I appeared to be suffering from some form of "schizotypal personality disorder". She itted that it was not too serious and that it was fairly common within modern human society.

"I discontinued the psychotherapy after the psychotherapist moved away, and I started working full-time with the house-painters. I worked on a full-time job for almost a year, then got an offer to work at another department store, and decided to take it.

"The fact was, I wasn't getting along with the guys I had to work with very well, and I was glad to have a chance at something else, just to get away from them.

"I worked a part-time job, at the department store, from late 92 to 93, then went to full-time in 93. I worked for most of the year, while driving an old, small, red Sentra which was a hand-me-down the parents sold me for a buck because they were planning on getting a new automobile and I needed transportation to get to work.

"The small red Sentra got me through most of 93, and then it broke down in September, and suddenly, I had to take the bus, 25 miles to and 25 miles from, the department store in Northampton, 5 days a week.

"I managed to do it through the winter somehow, but by the spring of 94, it really started to get to me. I wasn't getting enough rest away from the work because "bussing it" 50 miles every day was taking too big a slice out of my free-time. I was actually devoting 15 hours a day, 5 days a week, to the job.

"I was rising at 5 am to get going for work, I was out the door by 6 am, to walk the 4.5 miles across the bridge, across the river, to the city, where I caught a citybus to the bus-terminal. I was at the bus-terminal by between 7:30 and 8 am, and I was on the bus by 8 am, to be taken from the city bus-station, by highway, over 20 miles, to Northampton. In Northampton, by 8:30 am, it was just a short, 5 minute walk into town to the store.

"After closing the store at 5:30, I had to do it all in reverse, and I didn't get home until 8 pm. I had just about 2 to 3 hours to shower, eat, and relax, then I had to get some sleep, be up at 5 am, and do it all over again. I had to go by this very tight, robotic schedule, 5 days a week, for about 6 months before i could take no more.

"I didn't realize it at the time, but I wasn't getting enough sleep, and it started to get to me. Finally, one day in April of 94, I had a fight with the manager about something stupid, and got fired from the job. I really didn't know it at the time, but I was actually suffering from lack of REM-sleep again, just like it had been in the Air Force.

"So, by late April of 1994, I was out of work again.

"I received a severance of 2 weeks pay, but i couldn't collect unemployment insurance because I had been "fired" from the job. By May, it looked like I was doomed to be out in the cold again. When the parents suddenly showed up and told me they had sold the house that I was "house-sitting" for them, i expected to be homeless by June.

"But instead, my sister told me that I qualified for "social security insurance" because I had been diagnosed with a psychological problem and apparently, had done enough time working on all kinds of jobs in the past, such that my actual work-history, once put onto a list, didn't look so bad.

"I had all kinds of hard labor jobs before the accident in late 1982, between 1974 and 1982. Added to the job at the department store and the job with the painting company, between 1985 and 1994, it wasn't too bad.

"So, when I reflected on my work-history, while sitting with a social security agent, in June of 1994, I didn't feel too bad about accepting the government charity.

"Privately, I was still obsessed with my ambition to be a science-fiction writer and I thought that the government stipend would help me go "back to school" and learn small-publishing. It was still a somewhat practical trade, in spite of everything, and it was something I felt compelled to do.

"I accepted the stipend to pay the bills, to keep a roof over my head, while learning small-publishing and making my own books. It was a tight stipend and there was barely enough for tea and cookies after all the bills were paid.

"But I managed somehow, while feeding my obsession to explain the unknown universe around me, and the loveless purgatory it had put me in, after the accident in late 1982.

"Later that year, as I was writing "Day of the Mystikon", I used a time-space vehicle to go back in time and revisit the past, around that time in June of 1975

which bothered me so much. It was at that time that I recovered a memory from the past which had been buried and forgotten.

"It was during an early evening, at the old house, when Jarges confronted me in the kitchen and demanded the name of the girl I was seeing. I refused to tell Jarges the name of the girl, because I didn't trust Jarges with the information, and Jarges cursed me as I went out the door.

"It was after that trip back in time to 1975 that I recalled what the mother had said, after the accident, about making a "mistake" with the name of the girl I was seeing in 1975, and it all began to become fairly obvious what had actually happened at the time.

"Logical deduction pointed to Jarges as the source of the "misinformation" that caused mother to make the mistake in 1975, because he was the only one who had any knowledge about the girl I was seeing at the time.

"Unfortunately, by August of 1994, when I had finally recovered the memory and put the logical deduction together, it was almost 20 years too late to do anything about it.

"I had discovered that Jarges had been responsible for getting me sent on the fool's errand of 1975, to get me away from the girl I was seeing, and I had lost her, and there was nothing I could do to undo the damage.

"My heart bled as I felt the great pangs of regret for having lost so much because of an evil step-brother's lies. No one knows how heart-broken I felt at the time."

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Journal notes: 2021-06-29:

My Step-Brother was a Pathological Liar

"Jarges lied about me, then he got the step-father, his senior name-sake, to go along with those lies, and went on to create an echo-chamber for his lies about me with some of the friends he made, and finally, after resonating those lies within the echo-chamber for a few years, eventually began to believe those lies himself.

"By 1978, when he tried to get me to go naked with him and his friends, I'm fairly sure he had reached the point where he actually believed some of those lies, and was willing to go along with an echo-chamber that believed those lies also.

"I'm referring specifically to the one lie about me being a "gay weak-link". Apparently, the local boys and gals who were with the Naked Club were from

the left-leaning Athenian camp of pacifists who went along with the idea that "It's okay, we don't mind if you're gay" demographic, and wanted a chance to forgive him for being different.

"The problem with that reasoning was simple. I wasn't gay. The step-brother was a liar. I didn't get a chance to stop the lie before too many people had been corrupted by it, and he pretended he did nothing wrong at all, and simply went along with his own lies to see where they would go.

"For a pathological liar like my step-brother, at that time, he had established his ability to lie about me and shape me into whatever fool he wanted to be any time, and he had nothing to fear, because I always took the fall and he always came out smelling like roses.

"Nothing could possibly go wrong for him, because I was the one who always took the blame and the fall. His ability to lie his way out of anything and make me take the blame for it had turned him into the master and me into the slave.

"History records that after the summer of 1978, he once again proved how easy it was for him to make me take the fall for things going wrong. I was pushed out into the cold, rejected by everyone, and I didn't have a single friend left in the world in late 1982, when the accident occurred that led to my transfer.

"In retrospect, I wished i had a friend in the ACLU or somebody who recognized that Jarges was in violation of my rights, at that time. But there were none who had any real power to stand up to Jarges, aside from maybe Derk, but he was not

there in 1978, so he could not be of any help at the time. He was living in Virginia with his wife and kid.

"By the time Derk had moved back to the state, in 1980, it was too late to undo the damage Jarges had done, but even then, Derk himself had been corrupted by the lies.

"What Jarges did was nothing less than psychological warfare. He was a regular Prince Pugnacious, who instigated an offense against me the day after I was born, when he caught me nursing from mother's breast without his permission.

"Thereafter, he constantly accused me of being too stupid to function properly, made me feel foolish and guilty, humiliated me in front of people, insulted me to no end, and ultimately, acted like he owned me and I had to do everything his way if I wanted to have any kind of life.

"By 1985, Jarges had reduced me to a "beggar who couldn't be a chooser", who had to continue to work for him if I wanted to survive.

"He was a total control-freak who used a process known as gas-lighting to force me into subservient submission beneath his will-power; a complete violation of my rights, which i cannot possibly tolerate or ignore as if it never happened.

"This book of memories is a defense report which i hope will help to exonerate me from the terrible burden of this guilt complex forced upon me by the stepbrother's lies."

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Chapter 16: The Final Word

2021-06-30:

When all of the facts have been compiled about the case, there is no doubt about the fact that the step-brother was a pathological liar and a gas-lighter, who completely violated my rights and managed to get away with it for at least 50 years. The secret to his success at lying "pathologically" about me, was the of the step-father, who coincidentally, shared the very same name, as the "senior" to the "junior" liar and gas-lighter, Jarges.

Because both Jarges junior and Jarges senior participated in the violations, one lying while the other backed him up, in this case, they were both gas-lighters.

The logic cannot be denied.

1. The step-brother lied in the summer of 1975 and I was sent on a fool's errand which led to my eventual accidental death and transfer, 7 years later, by motorcycle accident, in late 1982.

2. Step-brother covered up the lie so that none would know about it, and feigned innocence, in the summer of 1978, and let me take the fall for that "misunderstanding".

3. That "misunderstanding" in the summer of 1978 led to my complete social rejection and alienation from human society. When the accident occurred in late 1982, I was completely alone without a single friend left in the world and no one to turn to for help. All had rejected me.

Such facts have been established and there can be no denial.

I have made my case.

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Final Notes:

1. Because my step-brother had me "gagged" with a threat on my life, during the 1970s, I was forced to be silent about him, to say nothing about him to anyone, and so in the summer of 1978, when he invited me to get naked with him and his friends, and I reacted badly and rejected the notion, by that time, he had everyone convinced that he was a "good" brother to me, even though he was not.

If he did not have me gagged at the time, I would have been able to tell everyone everything he did to me that hurt me that they did not know, at that time,

including my suspicions that he had something to do with the fool's errand of 1975.

Because he had me gagged, I was unable to tell anyone about the evil things he had done, and in the mean-time, I just wanted to find a good job, make some good money, and get away from the fascist control-freak. History records that he destroyed my life with lies before I had the chance to do that.

2. After the accident in late 1982, I suffered from some memory loss, and much of the details about what happened before the accident, in the 70s, was suppressed and lost for many years after. No memory-loss was mentioned at the time after the accident, because there was no trauma to the head, and the doctors did not notice it.

Because I was sent away, again, after the accident, in the spring of 1983, after my leg had healed and I could walk again, I failed to take the "local tour", which otherwise would have been helpful in the recovery of the details of my memory. Because I was sent away and I was forced to spend all of my time, after that, in unfamiliar territory, the details of the memory were suppressed, rather than stimulated and recovered.

Because I was sent away again in 1983, memory recovery was delayed by another 3 years, until I went back to work, on the east coast, in 1985.

3. Gas-Lighting is a form of insidious invasion of the mind by a master of deception. The gas-lighter uses its will-power to force its victim to become its slave, through a violation of their rights, followed by a complete denial, usually

backed up by a fellow gas-lighter or co-conspirator. Together, the gas-lighters lie to the victim, to force it to succumb to their will-power, while violating its rights and denying it after the fact.

Gas-lighting was first recognized as a social problem when an investigation uncovered a ring of gas-lighters who were into the practice of drugging and raping young women, then denying it after the fact, and leading them to think that they were "dreaming" and that it "never happened".

Such violations upon another human's rights, followed by complete denial, is obviously wrong. In fact, any violation of another human's rights, which is followed by complete denial, which becomes a regular "practice", is now considered to be a form of "gas-lighting" and it too, is wrong. Not only is "gaslighting" wrong, it is a violation of a human's Constitutional and civil rights.

Furthermore, it has been known to be a cause of insanity. This fact was one of the strongest ethical reasons the Justice department had for denouncing such "gas-lighting" practices as criminal violations.

In point of fact, because gas-lighting has been recognized as being a cause of insanity, gas-lighters can be prosecuted for the crime of "intentionally driving a human insane" for practicing their evil art. Let it be known to evil step-brothers everywhere, just in case they think they can keep on lying about "stupid little brothers" whenever they want.

4. When step-brother did the photo-ops between 1977 and 1978, at the same time I was under the "gag-threat" and I couldn't talk about him to anyone, out of

fear that he would find out and kill me, just as he threatened. I feared he could easily have me killed, and make it look like an accident. He could have made it look like my fault for being "stupid", and got the step-father to back him up on it.

I took that threat very seriously, kept my mouth shut about him the whole time, and hoped to get a good job, make some good money, and get away from him. Unfortunately, I could never know what to expect from him, and I didn't see that fatal day in the summer of 1978 when it was coming. If I had known he was about to use it as a means to destroy me, I would have opened up and spilled my guts to the world.

But because I did not see it coming at the time, I kept my mouth shut to buy more time, and nobody understood why i did not trust the step-brother in the summer of 1978. The continual "gag-threat" upon me, while I lost all of my friends, one after another, led to my complete social alienation and eventual destruction.

Step-brother's gas-lighting and gagging of me had been a success.

But now, the truth must be revealed. The gas-lighter must be exposed.

5. When I returned to the east coast home-town in 1985, I hadn't yet recovered enough details from the memory before the accident to realize what step-brother had done and I still couldn't see the forest for the trees on any of it. I was still very lost and confused.

It is possible that the treatment the family gave me, at that time, was largely based upon the false assumption that I was "slow upstairs", without taking into the possibility of any memory-loss due to shock from the accident (because there was no head-trauma).

In retrospect, I may have appeared "slow" to them because of the memory-loss, without them knowing it, and the only explanation available at the time was dictated by step-brother's life-long premeditated theory that I was just too "stupid" to grow up and be a responsible adult.

I believe the facts speak for themselves, in this case, and I have proven that I was a victim of step-brother's lies, gas-lighting, and other psychological warfare he used offensively against me, for the first 20 years of my so-called life.

Well, all of this may be decades late, but my conscience, in the end, agreed that it was perhaps the only hope i had left for the redemption of my indisol.

If this story does not help to exonerate me from guilt, I don't know what will.

Nick Zentor, 2021-07-12

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End of Line

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Afterword:

A Message for Mother

"When I was just about 6 or 7 years of age, around about 1965, our family was residing in the North End of the Big City, in an old fragile house with so many cracks in it one could feel it swaying like an old barn in the wind.

Aside from that, it was a roof over our heads, but it was tight, and with 5 children, and me at the end of the caboose, I was unfortunately forced to share a room with an older step-brother who hated me.

One day, the parents left my step-brother and I alone, and mother told the stepbrother that he was responsible for watching over me, because he was the older one. After the parents left, the step-brother started acting like "the boss" to me.

He took control of me as if I was a slave to serve him with whatever he wanted me to do. He twisted the meaning of "watching over me" into meaning he could be "the boss" to me, and exploited his powers over me completely to force me to do everything his way.

When I protested and refused to let him control me, he fought me, wrestled me to the floor, sat on me and twisted my arm behind my back and said, "I'm the boss! You have to do what I tell you."

Later, when I told the parents what he had done, how he had completely violated my rights and physically abused me, he denied it all, and the step-father believed him, and he got away with it.

I was shocked that the step-father believed him and not me. The step-father didn't even give me a chance to defend myself. He accepted the step-brother's lies as the truth and I was scolded for telling lies.

Mother was forced by the judgment of step-father to go along with the stepbrother's lies.

Mother, that was just the beginning of your brainwashing to follow the willpower of a lying pig son of Satan who hated me the day I was born and started telling lies about me the day after.

Step-brother was a liar, mother, a pathological liar who lied all the time to hurt me and to have his way with everything, and the step-father always took sides with him, so he always had his way.

I was gas-lighted into submission by step-brother's abusive violations of my rights, his denials after the fact, and the he got from step-father with the denial and the lies, for the first 20 years of my previous life (appx. 1960 - 1980).

Mother, you were conditioned to go along with a pathological liar. He lied about me and you believed him, because the step-father believed him, and you were forced to go along with both of them, and the lies and gas-lighting, for over 50 years.

After the accident in late 1982, I lost the details of my memory and it took years to recover those details. It was in 1994, after losing a department store job, when i was working on the science-fiction novel, "Day of the Mystikon", that i recovered the tell-tale memory of a confrontation with the step-brother. It was from a week or 2 before I was sent away on a fool's errand, in 1975, to get me away from the girl I was seeing at the time.

That memory pointed to the source of the misinformation about the girl i was seeing which led to my being sent on the fool's errand to get me away from her, which mother itted was a "mistake" due to misinformation, while I was healing with a broken ankle in a leg-cast, after the accident. That memory told me the name of the source of the misinformation; it was step-brother.

In 2018, after struggling with all kinds of problems, including PTSD, severe depression, insomnia, schizophrenic refraction, etc...I finally managed to recover enough of the details of my memory from before the accident in late 1982, and I fully realized what step-brother had done, I tried to tell you about it, mother, within the local parallel.

You were very closed minded and could not listen to what i had to say. You refused to accept the idea that step-brother could have done anything wrong to hurt me. You echoed the effects of decades of gas-lighting by a lying son of Satan and denied the idea that he could do anything to hurt me and implied that I

was either delusional or lying myself.

In other words, you simply went along with the effects of step-brother's gaslighting of denials and lies and accepted his lies as the truth, and you were unable to believe anything i had to say that contradicted those lies.

I can only hope that our spiritual mother has not been so deceived by such a pathological liar, because his lies have made me suffer for too long and I cannot continue to accept such persecution and punishment for the lies of an evil stepbrother."

Nick Zentor, 2021-05-08

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Afterword

The Refracted Lens

Those who do not know what it is like to be a victim of lies could not possibly understand the hell and the purgatory that such victims are forced to experience, completely against their will, and in complete violation of their rights.

My case may be somewhat unique, I suppose, or at least rare, since i have never read or heard about any such similar case, not exactly. There are perhaps countless cases of young males being lied to and tricked into doing stupid things like "fool's errands", such as the one I experienced in the summer of 1975, but I haven't heard of any such cases which involved 20 years of "gas-lighting" used against the victim.

My own case involved about 15 years of "gas-lighting", between 1960 and 1975, before I was tricked into going away on a "fool's errand" in the summer of 1975. "Gas-lighting" is an evil practice used by evil humans to force an individual, usually a young, weak female or male, into complete submissive subservience to the will of others, so that they bend to the will of the "gas-lighters" and let them have their way with them. The original "gas-lighters" bent their victims to the extent where they could physically and sexually violate them and abuse them, and the victims couldn't do anything about it.

The method of "gas-lighting" involves the violation and/or physical and /or sexual abuse of a victim by others, on one day or night, and the complete denial of the act later, after the fact. By denying the evil act after the fact, the victim is left alone with their victimization, with no spiritual or help whatsoever, so long as the humans they reside with deny the evil act, and they are forced to question the reality of it. Gas-lighters usually claim that their victims are just

"dreaming" when the victims turn to them for answers.

My step-brother gas-lighted me in much the same way. My step-brother, as it turns out, in spite of his success at fooling the family and others into believing otherwise, was actually nothing less than a spoiled-brat pig who hated me the day I was born and started telling lies about me the day after.

Because the step-brother was the "junior name-sake" to the "senior" old man, the head of the family, the old man believed everything he said about me, and most of it was lies. The two of them together made quite a team: one lied about me and the other used those lies as an excuse for treating me like the "black sheep" and "bastard" of the family.

Step-brother was extremely successful at lying about me and getting not just the step-father, but the whole family into believing his lies about me. After all, the step-father was the head of the family and his judgment was the rule. As a result, his spoiled-brat junior name-sake, the one who lied about me every chance he got, had everything his way and was able to turn the step-father and the whole family against me, with lies.

Step-brother was a pathological liar who lied "pathologically" about me, to turn the family and the community of neighbors and friends against me, and his lies and other evil actions, along with all of the endless gas-lighting, led to my destruction.

The point is, not only did step-brother commit all of these evil acts against me,

to this day, i am still the victim doing time with a sentence in purgatory, forced to take the blame for everything that went wrong, while he continues to be "free", living his life in the comforts of suburban paradise.

He continues to live it up in suburban paradise, while I rot in a cage in a loveless purgatory, below the poverty-line, a victim of his gas-lighting, psychological warfare, and lies.

In other words, he got away with it and I'm still fighting for my rights and submitting a defense report within a loveless purgatory, in an attempt to exonerate myself from the guilt he has put upon me.

Furthermore, my sanity is suffering because I cannot rest under such conditions, because my conscience cannot accept the idea that I am being forced to suffer from a guilt complex which was actually caused by the evil acts of my stepbrother.

My conscience cannot accept what he has done to me because it is wrong. What he did was wrong and I should not have to suffer for it.

Nick Zentor, 2021-05-21

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"Stone Cold Memories" by Nick Zentor

Copyright: Coldpost-85, 2021

All Rights Reserved

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