#WWG1WGA

 

1.

Molly brought it up: “You know...so, maybe, some good can come of this...” 

Shane didn’t like the idea.  There but for the grace of God...

Shane said that he would have been along for the ride but for the virus.  His secretary at the realty firm where he worked had tested positive the day before the trip to Washington. 

“You know that was just an excuse not to go,” Molly said.  “You don’t even believe in the virus.”

That wasn’t true.  Shane believed that the Covid existed and that it could make you very sick.  It was the death statistics that he challenged.  A bad flu is no picnic and, sometimes, old folks or people with other sicknesses died because of it.  Only a fool runs the risk of contracting the flu (or spreading it for that matter) and Shane said that he didn’t want to get the others sick.  He had no symptoms, but the news said that people who seemed completely healthy could spread the illness.

Molly showed him several screen shots that she had printed from her Pad.   

“That’s him isn’t it?”  Molly asked.

Shane hesitated.  “Well...it looks like him,” Shane replied.

“That’s a crime,” Molly said.  “That’s sure enough a crime.  The idiot posted it on Facebook.”

Shane pondered the point.  “Who are we to decide if that’s a crime or not?”

‘You’re right,” she said.  “We just make the report and let others decide.”

On the wall, the TV was tuned to a football game but without the sound.

“Tony’s tuition is due,” Molly said. “I’m behind on car payments.”

Sales were slow at the office and several of the junior associates were on furlough.  Shane hadn’t earned a good commission for almost four months.  Times were unsettled and there was sickness everywhere and people don’t sell and buy houses when they are quarantined.

Molly pushed across the table another screen shot printed with an FBI reward offer for tips leading to convictions.

“We need the money,” she said.

“It’ll never work,” Shane responded.

He knew that the real reason that he had not traveled to the Capitol was that he had a weak bladder and his bowels had been a little loose and unpredictable, probably due to fretting about the hard times ahead of them.  He thought it would be embarrassing to have to beg the driver to pull over at fast food places or rest stops to accommodate him.  It was an affliction.

“It seems a little disloyal or something,” Shane said.  

‘You can be loyal to that group of goons,” Molly said, “or you can show some loyalty to your family.”

“I have to think about this,” Shane said.  

He called his dog, attached the leash to her collar, and walked outside.  Wind rustled through the trees and the sidewalk was dark.  The dog was excited about her walk and panted.  Shane’s friend lived a couple blocks away.  The lights inside were soft and low.  Through the window, Shane saw a lamp casting its yellow rays on a refrigerator in the kitchen.  A big TV shone in another room like an aquarium lit from inside.  The garbage bin had been dragged to the curb and, as Shane stopped to note the address on the house, he smelled a faint odor coming from the refuse – perhaps, rotting shrimp.  

The dog defecated under the street lamp and Shane picked up the mess in a plastic sack from Costco.

At home, his wife, Molly, was on him again.

“You don’t have to pester me,” Shane said.  “I will do the right thing.”

He took his cell-phone from his breast pocket. The phone was cold and inert.  Shane imagined a wise older friend, a bearded man with kind blue eyes, almost like a brother to him, but not a brother and, therefore, entirely objective.  “What should I do?” Shane asked this friend.  But there was no friend.  No one was looking out for him.  That was the problem.  When these ideas occurred to him, tears came to his eyes.      

2.

Wentworth, whom everyone called “Wiggles,” sat on a stool at McDonald’s commanding a view of the parking lot.  It was an hour before dawn.  He held a cup of coffee in front of him, but he wasn’t really drinking.  The ride would be several hours in the car and he didn’t want the coffee to inconvenience him.  

He looked at his watch.  There was ground-fog in the hollows.  Cars were probing the grey mist with their headlights.

Already, they were behind schedule.  

A television in the dining room broadcast news about the certification of the electoral college votes.  The place was mostly empty although vehicles were lined-up for the drive-through.  Probably, most of the patrons were unsure as to whether the dining room was open.  

Norman’s Honda prowled through the fog and rolled to a stop outside flashing its lights.  Wiggles took a tiny sip of the hot coffee and, then, left the cup on the counter.

At the same time, Gloria’s husband drove into the parking lot.  Gloria got out of the car and tentatively approached the black Honda.  Wiggles saw the man behind the wheel scrutinizing the Honda and its occupants.  He looked a little downcast.

Wiggles got into the backseat of the Honda behind Osbourne who was seated ahead of him next to the driver.  Osbourne was wearing a military vest and holding a helmet on his lap.  Gloria sat next to Wiggles in the backseat.  A floral bouquet filled the vehicle – Gloria’s perfume.  Wiggles asked about Shane.  Norman said that Shane was sick and couldn’t come with them.  Wiggles glanced in the back of the Honda and saw that there was some khaki-colored tactical gear stowed there.   

They drove out of town.  Their breath fogged the windows.  There was no point in talking about politics or current events.  They all agreed on most things although with varying degrees of intensity.  The level of commitment to the cause could be a source of friction and so they talked about the weather and sports.  Norman tuned the dial to a talk radio station and, after a while, they just listened to the voices coming from the console.  Osbourne fell asleep and dropped his helmet on his foot.  He grunted with pain.  

Wiggles would have said that he was 100 percent committed to the cause.  But Norman was more gung ho than him and would have claimed that his enthusiasm was 200 percent.  Discussion, therefore, would have been pointless.

The road ascended and crossed the Blue Ridge above the Shenandoah Valley.  At the top of the grade, Norman exited for a rest stop.  Gloria thanked Norman for the bathroom break.  Wiggles stretched his legs.  Snow lay in silent mounds between the trees.  Animal tracks dotted the snow imprinting innumerable shadowy windows in the drifts.  Birds with a springtime timbre in their song called out to one another.

On the other side of the Blue Ridge, the freeway passed exits announcing Civil War battlefields.  Wiggles was interested in the Civil War and, once, had spent a good deal of time reading about its generals and battles.  He wanted to educate the others in the car about those battles but was frustrated that he couldn’t remember them that well.  

Norman drove across the great bridges.  White buildings with tall columns stood on knolls overlooking the wan watery landscape.  

It wasn’t hard to drive into the City.  Traffic was light.  Norman knew the place well and they easily found a parking ramp.  “In case we get separated,” Norman said that his passengers should write down the address of the parking place.  Norman also told them to make sure their cell-phones and watches were synchronized with respect to time.  “If we get split apart,” Norman said, “we’ll meet here at three o’clock this afternoon.”

Several thousand people were already listening to speeches and tape-recorded music was playing.  A row of cops stood across the roadway that had been closed for the demonstration. The cops were all wearing plexi-glass masks. 

Wiggles looked up toward the Capitol building.  It was the pale color of the snow drifted on the Blue Ridge and also pierced with innumerable small windows.

3.

A lot of people were standing on the white marble porch.  Wiggles held back.  He expected the phalanx of cops massing under a stand of trees on the Mall to charge forward and entrap the mob on the stone porch.  But the cops didn’t move and, indeed, backed away from the building.  The crowd made a sound in which cries and cheers mingled together so that the roar sounded like the sea beating on a rocky coast.  

Hollows suddenly opened into the sides of the big round building.  Wiggles was curious and, so, he walked to the stone steps.  The marble porch was high above him so crowded that people seemed to dangling from its edges.  He looked around.  Gloria was no longer at his side and Norman had gone missing also.  Osbourne was ahead of him, climbing upward step by step.  Wiggles recognized the duct-tape seaming the back of his vest and Osbourne’s round green helmet.  The crowd was all around, pressing against him and Wiggles thought that, if he dared, he could hover between steps held in the air above the marble treads by the crush of the mob. 

After a long time, the ascent leveled and Wiggles was on the porch.  The building was like a mountain overhead, pierced at its base by ragged, cavernous openings.  Broken glass was underfoot creaking and squealing on the marble.  Something gave at the base of the building and Wiggles was shoved forward, the whole crowd lunging at once with flags and banners tilted down as if to joust at the white marble flanks of the structure.

Then, he was inside.  His eyes didn’t immediately adjust to the gloom.  The space was dark and filled with stinging fumes.  Big columns seemed to crouch under the weight of a heavy and intricate ceiling pressing down overhead.  The floor was sodden with puddles and smears of mud.  The roar of the crowd echoed and re-echoed in the building, a deafening tumult in which individual voices were indistinguishable.  Wiggles slipped in the water on the marble and dropped down to his knees.  Someone stepped on his ankle and he bellowed in pain.  Hands like claws lifted him up and dragged him sideways.  Then, his back was against a stone wall.  He was sitting on the slick wet floor.  The crowd had encountered some obstacle and it spun back way from the center of the big stone room.  Wiggles felt as if he were far, far underground.  

  

4.

Hickberd had never voted in an election.  He didn’t even answer on-line surveys.  Hickberd had never attended a sporting event.  For a couple of years, he posted videos of himself rapping to freestyle beats that he downloaded from a lease-free website.  Hickberd proclaimed that he was rapping for Jesus.  One of his posts recorded 2 million clicks.  Hickberd was surprised that no one seemed to know anything about him despite the enormous popularity of that track.  Then, he discovered that the clicks were all ‘bots and that, in fact, no human ears had heard his music at all.  This was disheartening.

One afternoon, Hickberd happened onto a video showing a crowd besieging the Capitol building.  The people in the crowd had banners and they fought with policemen wearing green uniforms.  The flags were on long poles that could be used as lances and both sides sprayed one another with mists that were mostly ghostly white but, also, yellow and pink.  Hickberd didn’t know exactly what the battle was about but it fascinated him.

At that time, Hickberd was working to devise code to create computer games.  His efforts were hampered because he didn’t really know how to program or write code.  Although he had posted an advertisement seeking a collaborator, no one but nasty trolls had responded.  The assault on the Capitol interested him primarily because it seemed to present material that could be adapted into a game.

A few clicks brought Hickberd to a web site where footage showing the riot was posted to the internet.  Many of the clips were time-stamped and, so, the sequence of events at the Capitol could be reconstructed.  Hickberd watched the videos for several hours and, after a while, began to see patterns in the imagery.  Certain figures recurred, appearing in different locations and seen from various angles.  Of course, there was a large man with a bare-chest who wore a fur-covered helmet with bison horns.  This man’s face was neatly painted red, white, and blue and his biceps seemed to be tattooed in a pattern that suggested the bricks in a wall.  Sometimes, this man formed his jaw and lips into the shape of a trumpet and he bellowed.  On other occasions, the man with the horns on his head stood alone, stamping his feet and chanting.  There were others that Hickberd named and, then, tracked on their adventures inside the Capitol building: “Tall Dark Goon” was a very lean, almost skeletal man with a black skullcap and a black scarf covering the lower half of his face.  TDG, as Hickberd called him, wore some kind of gaiters around his calves, the sort of elastic sheath that keeps the trousers of  couriers from getting entangled in the spokes of their bicycles.  WW was Wild Woman, a small middle-aged lady who wore a blue banner as a cape.  DTM was a fat older man wearing a green military helmet that was emblazoned with a red insignia.  The plump man’s khaki-colored vest was too small for him and had split open across its back where the rift was closed with swaths of duct tape.  One of the sleeves to the man’s vest had also become detached and had been repaired with more duct tape.  Jolly Guy (JG) was husky man wearing a hooded sweatshirt over a motorcycle helmet.  He was always braying with derisive laughter.  GB was Goat Beard, a man with the eyes of a horror movie villain sporting a long beard that had been braided into a long, furry spike dangling from his bony chin.  GB roamed the Capitol with Dreadlock, a man with grey whiskers and long hair that seemed to have been styled by the same person who had braided his friend’s beard.  A woman with red hair and a turquoise cell phone decorated with big glittering hearts, Hickberd named CPL or Cell Phone Lady.  Accountant was a studious-looking fellow with black horn-rimmed glasses who carried a brown briefcase with him as he rambled through the marble halls of the building.  CA was a man who looked like Rasputin (at least as the mad monk was portrayed in comic books), wearing a sweat-shirt hand lettered CAMP AUSCHWITZ in crude white characters.  A fellow who looked like a hillbilly to Hickberd was nicknamed BBQ.  Q was a big man wearing Doc Martens with the letter Q painted on his forehead.  ZTM looked like a cop and carried a big white blossom of plastic zip ties.  With each hour, more and more videos were posted on-line.  By the end of the day, more than ten hours of footage was available for Hickberd’s study.  The more he looked, the more he saw.

The adventures within the Capitol were like a video game.  Hickberd’s protagonists roamed through a three-dimensional maze consisting of subterranean chambers with many Moorish-looking columns, long corridors barricaded in places with cherry-wood doors protected by cops, a huge round room with enormous shadowy paintings on the wall, brownish scenes with figures with honey-colored faces enclosed by gilded frames, and a place where marble statues gestured at the crowds of people marching through the room between red velvet ropes slung from heavy-looking brass stanchions.  There were stone stairwells, small airless-looking offices with pictures of politicians standing next to famous celebrities, and several big chambers with unfurled flags and marble balconies with Latin words inscribed on the walls.  The characters that Hickberd had named roamed around this terrain like the first-person shooters in games such as Doom or Duke Nuke-em.  Sometimes, they encountered small policemen, all identically clad, and diminutive – the policemen were pygmies and readily swept to the side by the rampaging mob.  The objective of the game was unclear.  The rioters seemed to be looking for something but it wasn’t clear what they were seeking.  Perhaps, they didn’t know themselves.  

For several days, Hickberd scrutinized the footage.  With each hour, more videos were added.  He recognized the men and women whom he had named.  After awhile, they seemed to him to be familiar acquaintances, almost friends.  Sometimes, he went upstairs to make himself a sandwich and there was a cooler in the corner of his basement room where he kept cold energy drinks.  

Hickberd fell asleep in his command chair at the console of his computer.  In his dreams, he had been inside the Capitol himself roaming the galleries with ZTM, Accountant, and Duct-Tape Man.  He smelled something cooking and went upstairs where his mother and sister were heating a pizza in the oven.

“What have you been doing down there?” Hickberd’s mother asked him.

“Working,” Hickberd grunted.

He had a couple of slices of pizza and, then, went back down stairs.  In the interval that he had been in the kitchen, three more short videos had been added to the archive. 

5.

Norman programmed the Honda’s navigation system for Richmond and blocked routes that required freeway driving.  He didn’t intend to actually go that way, but thought it prudent to confuse the On-Star system because government satellites, he said, could access the directions and use that data to hunt for them.  Norman said that the authorities were erecting checkpoints at the freeway ramps and so it was best to use surface roads and make many turns.  It took them a long time to reach the suburbs beyond the river and, then, the suburbs of the suburbs.  Norman used a paper map to find a way to the Interstate far from the city.  Osbourne held the map across his lap.  Wiggles saw that the duct-tape on the back of his tactical vest was ripped.  

At a rest stop in the country, Norman re-set the On-Star for a route to Luray Caverns.  “That will confuse the bastards,” Norman said.  They used the toilets and, then, continued on their way home.  Norman was hurt with a bad limp.

Gloria was a little miffed.  “You guys just abandoned me,” she said.  “Well, I got caught up in the moment,” Norman said.  Osbourne said something similar.  Wiggles was apologetic.  He told her he had been swept into the building, but, then, fallen and, now, his back and ankle were aching him.  Gloria extracted a vial of Ibuprofen from her purse and gave Norman three tablets.  Norman found an unopened bottle of water under the seat and swallowed the medicine.  

Gloria said that the speeches were all fine and inspiring and that she hiked the street u[ to the Capitol with the rest of them.  The crowd was peaceful, she said and everyone was happy to be part of a majestic common purpose.  Then, she saw people fighting up on the big porch to the building.  The crowd rolled forward and, then, broke against the steps with some groups recoiling back down the lawn toward the Mall.  Gloria found herself separated from the others as squads of police inserted themselves into the marchers and began to provoke them.  She slipped on something spilled on the sidewalk and would have fallen except that a very tall man dressed all in black caught hold of her and kept her upright.  The tall man was wearing goggles as eye-protection and he had curious no-color pupils and the swath of skin visible between his black stocking cap and black mask was as white as ice.  The man muttered something that Gloria couldn’t hear clearly.  “What is that?” she asked.  The man’s voice seemed somehow distorted by his mask, as if there were a device hidden in the cloth to disguise the sounds that he made.  In the garbled words, Gloria thought she heard the man say: “Where we go one, we go all.”  Then, he beckoned that she should follow him and hurried toward the Capitol steps, cutting through the crowd the way a knife cuts through butter.  

Gloria had to find a toilet.  So she went toward the side of the crowd where the police were standing in a disorderly and disengaged line.  It seemed to her that people should have planned better for an event of this size.  Somewhere, there should have been ranks of Porta-potties for the demonstrators to use, the sort of accommodations that you find at a music festival.  Gloria said: “If we had been Black, you can bet they would have set up Porta-potties and lots of them too.”  In the distance, she saw several porta-potties and hurried toward them.  But the portable toilets were inside of a small construction site where several yellow front-end loaders and forklifts were parked.  A couple of demonstrators were using bolt-cutters to rip open the wire mesh fence.  Someone flashed a weapon.  She saw a gun muzzle under someone’s coat.  This frightened her and she backed away from the construction site.  A few blocks away, she used a restroom in a Starbucks.  By that time, police had surrounded the Capitol and, so, there was nothing for her to do but sit at the coffee shop and wait for the time when she could meet the others at the ramp where the car was parked.  She ordered pastry to pass the time and read a newspaper.  

“That was my day at the Capitol,” Gloria told the men in the Honda with her.    

6.  

It gets dark early in the first week of January.  They crossed the Blue Ridge in the darkness.  Norman told the others in the Honda that he had seen several blood trails on the marble floors, perhaps, in the rotunda or the place with the statues.  He had reached a gallery overlooking a big room where there were pews arranged in a semi-circle facing a great wooden throne.  The room had a blue carpet with yellow markings and there was a flag hanging down like a colorful curtain behind the throne.  People were rummaging around in the cubby-holes under a rostrum.  Norman said that he took a picture to prove that he had reached this place and, then, gone into the corridor and down the stairwell without ever encountering any guards or police.

“It’s like they just welcomed us into the place,” Norman said.

Norman said that he had kept a sharp eye out for surveillance cameras but didn’t see any at all.

“You weren’t looking, dude,” Osbourne said.  “They were everywhere.  About every 30 feet.”

“I didn’t notice,” Norman replied.

They drove through the darkness.  The exits were lit by big steel towers displaying signs for fast food places.

“There were too many of us,” Norman said.  “No way that the feds can make any arrests.”

“I don’t know about that,” Osbourne replied.

“No, I just ambled right in,” Norman said.  “No one tried to stop me.  I thought it was okay.  No one’s gonna be arrested over this.  Not when they just opened the doors for us.”

“No one opened the doors for me,” Osbourne said.  “I had to fight my way in.”

“I just don’t see how any one can be arrested.  We were welcomed inside.”

“They’ll come down on all of us like a million-ton shit-hammer,” Osbourne replied.  “Mark my words, brother.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Norman said.  “There’s just too many of us and I didn’t see any surveillance cameras.  I didn’t see any security at all.  It was like we were their guests for the afternoon.”

At the rest stop, Norman had posted his pictures of the big room with blue carpet to his Facebook page under the caption: “1776!”  He now wondered if he should maybe delete the posting.

“It’s a popular movement,” Norman said.  “You can’t just arrest everyone.  And if you can’t arrest everyone, you can’t arrest anyone.”

“Where we go one, we go all,” Gloria said.

“I’m right aren’t I?” Norman asked.  “There are just too many of us for anyone to be prosecuted.  I’m right, aren’t I?”

The exits and signs were becoming more familiar to them.

“I don’t know about that,” Osbourne said.

“I’m sure it’ll be okay,” Norman said.  “There’s too many of us.  They won’t dare.”

7.

Osbourne’s experience was different.  He told the others in the Honda that he had scrambled into the Capitol building by crawling up and over a heap of fallen bodies.  Guns were firing on all sides and flash-bangs burst in the clouds of tear gas.  Fortunately, Osbourne had treated his eyes before charging into the Capitol, rubbing his eyelids with slices of raw onion that he kept in a baggy in his tactical vest, and, so, he was able to charge through the stinging fog.   

People were skirmishing in the marble tunnels.  Osbourne avoided the fighting.  He saw several flags fallen to the stone paving slick with mud and water tracked into the halls by the demonstrators.  Osbourne said that he searched high and low.  First, he found a narrow alabaster alley barred by several heavy iron doors.  The doors were marked with black letters on yellow background warning that no one was authorized entry.  Beyond the doors, a ramp led downward to where Osbourne saw altars for sacrifice and blood-spigots.  Suicide chambers were marked by numbers and there were torture dungeons for kidnaped children.  In a dark vault, tracks crisscrossed, subway lines running to various places where cult members worshiped or murdered little boys and girls.  Osbourne saw congressmen and -women fleeing through the shadowy passageways but they were wearing black masks with parrot beaks and he couldn’t identify them.  

On an iron scaffolding above the subways, Osbourne found metal stairs scaling the inside of the Capitol dome.  A sign said that there were 365 steps, one for each day of the solar year.  He ascended the steps and heard his boots echoing against the iron in the curving chamber.  Great iron ribs soared above him and between them, Osbourne saw vats of human blood insulating the spaces between the stone outer dome and the ribbed iron structure supporting the marble facade.  The higher that he climbed, the tighter the space and the steeper the steps.  Small portholes opened onto a great abyss.  When Osbourne paused, panting from the climb, he peered through the round steel-framed oval windows.  Far below, patriots clashed with police on the elaborately patterned floor of the rotunda.  More human blood was stored between the domes the higher that Osbourne climbed and, now, it seemed that he was inside a vast and corrupt body, spiraling upward between huge pillars of blood squeezed into translucent tubes.  It was hard to breathe and the air smelled like the gutter of a slaughterhouse and the darkness in the cramped space increased, a deep crimson gloom through which Osbourne was climbing.  At last, he reached a tiny porch ringed by marble pillars.  It seemed as if he could see the whole republic from that vantage: the tidal basin and rivers spanned by bridges animate with traffic, the sea shining against the cloudy horizon, and the wave of the Blue Ridge toppling over the western horizon.

Osbourne said that he climbed back down to the floor of Capitol.  All of the towering doors were open and he simply walked out of the building and, then, down the mall.

“That’s quite the story,” Norman said.

Osbourne replied: “It’s all true.”

8.

On the dark web, Hickberd found detailed diagrams showing the interior of the Capitol building including its secret chambers and defensive bunkers.  Some of the websites were annotated with information as to where certain members of congress could likely be found so that sentence could be executed upon them.  A few of the charts were marked with places where explosive charges might be planted to bring the Capitol dome tumbling down.  

Using the comprehensive plans for the Capitol and adjacent structures, Hickberd was able to trace very precisely the movements of his rioters through the building.  Using time-stamps on some of the video footage, he could chart a chronology of the events in the Capitol.  His spread sheet tracking the people prominent in the Capitol attack grew to many pages.  Hickberd imagined devising a program that would schematically display where the various people that he had identified had been and when in the sequence of events.  His idea was to prepare a great synopsis of the attack on the Capitol that could be displayed with animated figures darting here and there in the labyrinth of rooms and corridors in the building.  

CA, for instance, entered the building on its west side, fighting with cops briefly in the crypt and, then, marching through the statuary hall climbing some steps and, then, crossing the rotunda to the House of Representatives chamber.  Q entered with CA but avoided the fight in the crypt and, instead, found his way directly to the well of the Senate.  BBQ reached the rotunda and, then, climbed to an upper gallery where he walked up and down a corridor.  The man wearing the tactical vest repaired with duct tape came through a smashed window on the main level and, then, descended some steps to the crypt.  He vanished for a few minutes and, then, reappeared in the rotunda.  Then, DTM disappeared for another fifteen minutes materializing later in stairwell near the dome.  Wall mounted surveillance showed him ambling down a long carpeted corridor where he stopped at each office, knocked, and, then, tried the door to see if it was unlocked.  The doors all seemed to be locked.  He appeared to be looking for someone.  Later, he exited the building through a handicapped entrance on the side of the great cascade of stepsleading up to the porch around the Capitol.  ZTM and Accountant made a bee-line through building to the Senate where they ambled around for a quarter of an hour.  Goatbeard and Dreadlock spent most of their time in the stairwells by the Senate.  They rushed up and down the steps several times.  Video showed them chasing a Black man in a police uniform who, sometimes, paused to brandish a baton at them.

And so it went: 136 characters in the video game, moving here and there, sometimes together and sometimes apart.  After Hickberd put the final touches on his spreadsheet, embedding links to the relevant surveillance and cell-phone footage, he called the local police.  Rewards could be earned by providing information leading to arrests. The officer who spoke with Hickberd provided him with a phone-number for the FBI tip-line.  Hickberd called the FBI and explained his research and the spread sheet that he had developed with links embedded to the actual time-stamped surveillance and cell-phone footage.  The woman at the FBI seemed to be very interested in his research.  She took down his name and home address and said that an agent would be dispatched forthwith to review the results of his analysis.  Hickberd said that he thought it was his patriotic duty to cooperate with authorities.  He waited for several weeks, but no one from the FBI contacted him.  Then, he called again.  This time the person who spoke with him tried to get him to admit that he had been at the Capitol among the rioters,  filming the uprising himself.  The conversation was unsatisfactory and Hickberd hung up.  

9.

A month after the election, the old man was still flying a blue Trump flag over the front steps of his home.  He was a disagreeable neighbor and quarreled constantly with those living near him.  The old man owned a small terrier that he let roam the neighborhood and it was constantly pooping on other people’s lawns. 

After a dispute with the lady next door, the old man began to build a wall.  He researched city ordinances because he wanted the wall to be as high as allowed by law.  Several truckloads of brown bricks were delivered to his property and piled up in disorderly heaps.  The old man had worked in the construction trades for most of his life and so he knew had to build things.  First, he erected corner pillars measured to the exact height specified by the ordinance.  As finials atop the corner pillars, he placed wrought-iron lamps that he wired to a switch in his house.  Then, he began to lay bricks between the pillars to complete the wall.  

Twice, the lady next door called the City and an inspector came to the old man’s yard and measured the wall.  It was an eighth of an inch below what the ordinance forbade.  There were ambiguities about the lamps – strictly speaking they didn’t represent wall but, rather, lamp posts and these could be taller. 

The lady next door used her computer to access the FBI Capitol Violence tip line.  The website had a place where informants could post digital images identifying people implicated in the uprising at the Capitol.  She wasn’t sure that her complaints about the old man as a bad neighbor were relevant, at least, strictly speaking, but was pretty sure that the old man supported the insurrection and was a domestic terrorist.  So, she used her cell-phone to make a video of the spite wall on her property line.  In several shots, she took care to portray in the background the blue Trump flag hanging next to the old man’s front door.  She also posted a video of the old man’s terrier pooping under a shrub next to her house.  A man with a foreign accent called her a few days later and said that he was investigating the old man’s involvement in the assault on the Capitol.  The woman thought that the FBI man was an imposter and she told him all sorts of incredible lies.  She assumed that he was calling from India or Bangladesh.

A week later, a car with government license-plates pulled up to the old man’s house.  The old man was at the wall, laying brick.  Two men spoke with him and there was some kind of disagreement.  The old man threw a brick at the government car and one of the officers tased him.  He flopped to the ground, crying out in a shrill voice.  Then, the other officer rolled him over and put handcuffs on his wrists.  Working together, the two officers lifted the old man up and put him in the backseat of their car.  The old man was weeping and his hunched-up shoulders trembled. 

10.

One of Hickberd’s friends, @partyallthetime, was also interested in the characters involved in the Capitol riot.  He emailed Hickberd a link to some footage that he had acquired showing ZTM.  Most of it was familiar to Hickberd but there were a couple of additional shots showing Zip-Tie Man using a urinal in an ornate marble toilet.  The image had been posted on social media with a caption in which ZTM said that he was pissing in a famous congresswoman’s toilet.  This didn’t make much sense because the image showed a urinal in a men’s bathroom. @partyallthetime said that the FBI had been very interested in his compilation of surveillance and Facebook postings showing ZTM.  In his email, @partyallthetime said that his images of ZTM were proprietary.  “I don’t want you taking credit for my work,” @partyline emailed.  “No offense, but there’s a reward involved.”  Hickberd responded that he was insulted that his friend thought that he would poach his footage.  

@partyline asked Hickberd if he had any footage of the “dude running around in duct-taped flak jacket.”  The authorities were apparently interested in this man as well.  Hickberd said that he had some video showing DTM.  “I could say it’s proprietary, but I won’t.  It’s the internet.  Everything’s for free,” Hickberd emailed @partyallthetime.  He sent him a link to his images of DTM.

“I’m not interested in specific people except as they interact with the whole group,” Hickberd wrote @partyallthetime.  “I’m a historian,” Hickberd said, “and a game developer.  I’ve got people interested in a game called ‘Storm the Capitol!’.  It’ll recreate the whole insurrection.”  

@partyallthetime wrote back to Hickberd and said that he had looked at the pictures of DTM.  “Not much of a rampage,” Hickberd’s friend emailed. 

“You know who DTM looks like?” @partyallthetime asked.

“Who?” Hickberd asked.

“Luigi,” @partyallthetime responded.

“Who is ‘Luigi;?”

“Super Mario Bros,” @partyallthetime said.  “Moves like Luigi too.”

“I see the resemblance,” Hickberd emailed him.

11.

If things can be remembered, that is, brought to mind, so also can they be intentionally forgotten.  The door swings both ways.  Wentworth, whom everyone called Wiggles, decided to turn over a new leaf.  He changed his diet to eat only organically-grown foods.  Pesticide-impregnated and genetically modified fruits and vegetables were part of a plot to induce mutations in the gene-pool.  This was also true of meats butchered from animals raised in confinement, force-fed hormones, and injected with dangerous antibiotics.  A vast conspiracy existed in the food industry and Wentworth knew that the citizens of this republic were the unwitting test subjects of sinister experiments.  He purchased meat in bulk from a like-minded farmer to whom an uncle had introduced him.  At the supermarket, he shopped for only certified non-GMO organically raised produce.  As a result, he lost weight and felt more healthy than he had for years.  

Wiggles remembered when door-to-door salemen sometimes called.  When he was younger, the doorbell’s ring might summon him to an encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries with scrubbed, freshly shaven faces wearing white shirts and black ties.  Every few years even politicians running for re-election might come to his door.  But, recently, it seemed that there were no more door-to-door salesmen hawking magazines or girl-scout cookies or home cleaning products.  The Witnesses and Mormons didn’t call anymore and the politicians all seemed to be in hiding.  And, so, Wiggles decided to remove the button for the door-bell next to his front door.  He used a screwdriver and simply took the apparatus from the wall, using some grout to fill up the cavity.  Wiggles put in an improved lock to his door.  The lock wasn’t to keep people outside from coming in; it was to protect those inside – at least, that’s how Wiggles thought about these security measures.  

His home had been built many years earlier, before his neighborhood was annexed to the city.  He had his own well, although recently the water had tested high for nitrates.  But Wiggles didn’t want to be connected to the municipal water.  Who knew what kinds of chemical additives and mind-control substances had been dissolved in the city water?  And, then, he received a notice that the city intended to build a sidewalk along the front of his property using the boulevard right-of-way for the project.  This troubled Wiggles and seemed an infringement upon his rights and, worst of all, he received an assessment in the mail declaring that he would have to pay for this improvement to his property.

Wiggles told his wife that he intended to appear at the City Council meeting to protest the assessment.  She replied that it was best for him to keep a low profile particularly in light of his trip to Washington.  “The dust hasn’t settled on that yet,” she said.  “Every day that passes means I am less and less likely to hear anything more about that cluster-ef,” he replied to her.

At the City Council meeting, Wiggles became agitated and said that he was being persecuted.  In the corridor outside the council chamber, Wiggles spoke with a lady who lived in his neighborhood.  She had a petition before the Council about a spite wall that her next-door neighbor had built.  “Why do you think they are persecuting you?” the lady asked.  She was a school-teacher and Wiggles had observed the bumper-stickers displayed on her car.  But he was excited, twitchy with adrenaline from his presentation to the Council.  Public speaking frightened him and so he felt all jangly and voluble.  Wiggles said that he thought the authorities were coming after him because of his visit to the Capitol building.  “Really?” the woman said.  

A week after the Super Bowl, Wiggles was sitting in his recliner watching TV.  There was a thunderous knock at his front door.  Of course, there was no doorbell to ring.  Wiggles stood up and parted the curtains slightly and saw several men standing on his porch masked like brigands.

12.

The phone rang.  Shane’s wife picked it up.  She listened to someone speaking so loudly that Shane could hear the sound of speech, but not the words.

Shane’s wife put down the phone.  It was rare to receive a call on the land-line.

“What was that about?” Shane asked.

“Crazy stuff,” Molly said.  “Something about Judas and thirty pieces of silver.”