Alice Scripts - Alice Isn't Dead Transcripts

These bouts of anxiety would come and go, sometimes completely overwhelming me, right up until I finally allowed myself to write about the fear. First, I wrote the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a show in which I piled all of my doubts and anxieties and thoughts about mortality. Then, I wrote Alice Isn’t Dead, where the main character suffers from anxiety. And, not just anxiety, but the exact kind of anxiety I do. Her experience of the disorder might not be yours, but I promise you that it’s very much mine. Since allowing myself to incorporate anxiety in my writing, it has lessened in my life. Not gone away, of course. I am anxious literally every second of every day. But, it is manageable. Air hasn’t stopped working for me in years. Writing horror is therapeutic in the same way that reading horror is therapeutic. It provides a harmless way to consider your darkest and bleakest thoughts, dragging those anxieties into the light and, in doing so, at least partially disarming them. Writers of horror are often asked if we’re ever scared by one of our own stories. But these images and fears were already inside our brains. That’s...how we were able to come up with them. Horror writing is just us taking the fears we’ve always lived with and sharing them with anyone who wants to partake.

I’m on the waterfront of a city. I don’t know which one. A lot of high-end stores, Louis Vuitton and the like, but those are everywhere. Like a Starbucks, they give up no secret of their location. Palm trees. But that could be anywhere, too. Across the water... Is the water a river? A bay? There are three skyscrapers in a row, and laid across the top of the three of them is what appears to be a cruise ship. An entire boat perched on top of three skyscrapers. But it is not a dream. I am not dreaming. I start walking. I pick a direction and go. I appear to be wearing clothes and sensible shoes, so, there’s that. It doesn’t take me long to figure it out, as I pass through the shadows of the tall buildings. I am in Singapore. I have never been to Singapore. I don’t remember getting on any flight to get here, but here I am. It all feels entirely real as I walk. The heat, and the crowds, so different from the lonely highway, the air-conditioned truck. I usually see the world from inside a capsule. And now I am in a city of tall glass capsules, and I am the one on the outside. I pass down a road, and there are a series of trees. But instead of leaves, they have brightly-colored umbrellas growing from them. But this is not a dream. Eventually, I have gone very far. Farther, I think, than I can walk. I don’t remember how I got here. I am on a quiet road surrounded by dense foliage. But I can see planes landing overhead. I am near the airport. A yellow sign with red text points me down a path to what is described as “The German Girl Shrine.” I follow the sign and discover that it is true to its word. A German teenager who died in World War One and is now worshipped as a Taoist deity. [chuckles] Well, we all leave legacies, I suppose. I go past the shrine, down to the water. Houseboats float quietly. I smell the dampness of the ground where it meets the gentle waves. And in the distance, above the water, attached to no building, I see a window with a red curtain covering it. But I am not dreaming.

I am in a hallway. It seems to go on for miles, but I think it is a trick of perspective. I think the hallway gets narrower and narrower, making it seem to go much farther than it actually does. The walls are all window, and I find myself looking out onto green hills. It could be Minnesota, maybe. Maybe Michigan. I’m not sure. I turn away from the view and see that I am in a structure jutting out from a house. There doesn’t seem to be any supports for this hallway over the drop, and so I make my way into the building. It’s empty, but has the look of a well-trodden tourist attraction. I am here before or after visiting hours, I don’t know which, because I don’t remember coming here. Every room is a new surprise. A full-sized carousel, silent and dark. I pass by it, and every light blares suddenly. Manic carnival music pops on, with a drum section I would describe as deeply aggressive. I scream. But there’s no one in sight. The horses bob up and down to the tinny march, and I leave. Another room. A staircase leading down intricate stained glass of religious themes. Lambs and crosses and such. The sunlight dapples the religion onto the steps. One room is just an entire old-fashioned main street, shop fronts and streep lamps, but covered in dust and never lived in. I realized I know this house. I read about it once in a novel, although I can’t remember which one. I had enjoyed the novel, I remember that. It was something spooky, something about road trips and weird America. But I can’t put my finger on the name. Finally, I find the exit. Outside, the sun is dead center overhead, but still, there are no people. This must be a dream, but I know it is not. Over the road in front of the house, in the middle of the air, and attached to no building, is a window with a red curtain. I step toward it, but already know that this is not the time I will reach it. Maybe next time.

I’m at the end of a valley leading down to the water. It’s sunny, but cold. The trees are deep green, the green of a place that gets a lot of rain, or a lot of melted snow, or a lot of both. Clouds cling to the mountains, like they do for reasons I’ve never bothered to look up. I walk by a yellow building, a hotel, apparently, although it does not appear to have been used as such in quite a long time. There is something especially haunting about an abandoned place where people once slept. Sure, abandoned office buildings and abandoned warehouses can bring up strange feelings, but it’s abandoned places that still hold beds where people dreamt and woke again, those are the ones that stick with you. On the third floor, I see a woman in a white dress looking out the window. A squatter, maybe. I raise my hand to her, and she raises her hand back, smiling sadly. And then I keep on walking past. It doesn’t take long to figure out I am in Skagway, Alaska. There are signs saying so. I try to think about what I know about this place as I walk. As it happens, I know about a strange miracle near here, just across the border. The Carcross Desert, the smallest desert in the world. A patch of arid sand, incongruous in the Yukon, kept a desert by the rain shadow of nearby mountains. Again, all of these amazing things caused by how mountains affect clouds. A subject I just have never bothered to learn anything about. I make my way to the port, where a cruise ship the size of several city blocks has docked, towering over this scattered little town. I’ve never seen the recreational appeal of these behemoths. They make me a little nauseous with the size of them. Looking closely, I realize with a sinking feeling that there is something off about this cruise ship, and it is something that I am becoming familiar with. One of the windows toward the bottom of the boat is not like the rest of the stateroom windows. Instead, it has an old-fashioned wooden arch frame, and a red curtain is drawn across it. As I look, the curtain moves, as though something on the other side had brushed against it.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 10: “An Ending”.

[sound of a key in a lock]

Keisha: It had been so long since either of us had been there.

Alice: I didn’t recognise the smell. When I lived here, my brain filtered out the house’s smell. Now it came on overwhelmingly. Not bad but – unfamiliar. This place belonged to other people. People who we were once, but we no longer are.

Keisha: The night we came home, we made pizza. It all came back as though it had only been a few days. Flour on our hands and sauce on our hands, our hands on our hands. Something forgettable on the television. Leg upon leg. This is a life, Alice, this is what it’s made of. Hand upon hand upon leg upon heart, upon couch, upon on a day when we make bread together.

Alice: Keisha sure loves baking. She finds meditation in it. Me? I find meditation in her pleasure in it. I love that she loves it. We put on the TV, there was the news. A fire outside of Tacoma. A landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in St. Joseph. I changed the channel. We didn’t need to concern ourselves with all of that. Not for a while.

Keisha: Routine happened sooner than we thought possible. It’s only a couple weeks until we again think of it as our bed. Before I make the coffee and she makes the smoothies and that’s our morning done. We don’t even think about what next. We’ve earned the right to merely exist for a little bit. To exist for each other and for ourselves. To touch, and in touching to love. The only blip is one Saturday when she offers to make us omelets and my stomach lurches. I tell her I’d prefer we never ate those again and to please never ask me why.

I spend that whole weekend thinking about Earl and how he died. A life, just a life, lived. We’d forgotten it was possible.

Alice: And then a month has gone by, and then a year. We don’t hear anything about Thistle. We don’t hear anything about Praxis. I have a new job and she has a new job. We’ve reconnected with friends, we’re doing it. Whatever this is, we’re doing it.

Love is the look she gives me when we both come from work and we’re tired, but one of us has to figure out what dinner will be, and so we both go into the kitchen, put our hands on our hips, furrow our brows at what’s in the fridge. Love is each of us showering before bed, one after the other. We can’t shower at the same time, because we like very different temperatures of water, and that’s love too. I brush my teeth and she pees. The fog in the mirror gives way to a portrait of the two of us preparing to sleep. It’s a portrait of love, and we look at it every night.

Keisha: Love is the way her neck smells. That’s where it’s strongest, the side of her neck. And I lean into it and I breathe in, and I remember what it means to live with another person.

Love is the hours we spend under a blanket on the couch, and love is also the hours we spend apart, earning a living so that we can return to the couch, once more lie down together. Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids and it’s the equilibrium of all the functions that sustain us.

Alice: Love is the absence of all she could say to me. It’s knowing that there is pain and choosing to never activate it. Not as a single choice made once and left secure forever, but a daily choice. Each morning we wake and she holds my betrayal in her hands and sets it gently down and we go on with the day.

Love is not freedom. But freedom isn’t inherently good, there can be terrible freedom and wonderful captivity. Love is wonderful captivity. It is a constraint from which you never wish to escape.

Keisha: Love in the morning is a cup of coffee made just the way she likes it. And love at noon, as the way the sun through her hair makes an imprint on my breathing. And love in the afternoon, when I nap alone but nap knowing that she is pacing around the house somewhere. And her motion is near my stillness. And love in the evening, as a laying of hands and a stretching of limbs. And love in the quietest hour of night, when in a moment of wakefulness between hours or dreaming, I hear the soft hiss of her sleeping and feel what birds must feel when nesting.

We are nothing if not absurd. We are nothing.

Alice: Love as an activity and as an emotion and as a bodily function and as a series of decisions and as a meal prepared and eaten together at a home we share.

Keisha: Love as a person who returned to me and then never left again.

Alice: I never left again.

Keisha: It’s two years later and we’re watching TV together and I think: it’s like it never happened. And that’s not true. It’ll never be like it never happened. And we will never be quite who we were before it happened. But it’s similar. It’s so similar you could be fooled into forgetting all the pain and loss.

For a moment, I let myself be fooled. I leave behind memories, and I feel the physical contact of her next to me, and I let that contact fill in for all the ways our lives could have gone. Because they didn’t go those ways, did they? Hmm.

They went the way they went. And if I try to go back and change anything, I’d probably just fuck it up somehow so I wouldn’t have this moment. This quiet in-between moment, this moment in which absolutely nothing interesting is happening. Except that I get to be in love with my life and she is here to be loved.

It’s this rush of emotions all at once and I’m crying and she’s asleep. She’s fast asleep, because we get to know, we get to fall asleep on the couch watching TV. [sighs] Man, it was this whole mess of emotions, and I didn’t even know yet that we had been hoping for finally worked and that I was pregnant.

Alice: Seven years later and the kid’s making a meal of going to school. Dragging her feet and Keisha’s the one dealing with it, because it’s her turn. We don’t have to take turns, Lord knows I owe her a thousand lifetimes of apologies, but she has taken the business of forgiveness seriously and she won’t let me act guilty or overly nice or do more chores than my share.

“I forgave you and that’s it and I don’t wanna hear another word,” she said once and then never again, because we never talked about it again. That’s astonishing, right? All that happened to us and we never talked about it again. But it was the only way to move forward. We had to face away from what was behind us.

We named her Sylvia, our daughter. We didn’t tell her everything that happened to her namesake, not when she was six of course and not later either. How would we have begun to explain, what words could we even use? I don’t think those words exist. But we made sure that she knew that she was named after a brave woman who had devoted her life to making the world better and had done it. She had damn well done it! This world is better because of her. What do the details matter?

Sylvia, our Sylvia, she asks if she can have two cookies at her lunch, and Keisha tells her no she definitely can’t. And then we finally get her out the door to school.

Keisha: 12 years later and shit if we aren’t (--). Us. [chuckles] We have fought actual monsters, and now we are puttering around our house thinking how quiet it is without that kid shouting at us or laughing along with us, depending on the mood of the day.

I think we did a good job raising her. We did the best job that we were capable of. Two damaged women who hardly knew how to put themselves together, let alone how to construct someone else’s life. Now she’s off in the world, and that’s the start of it. It’ll be up to her to figure all that out.

I look out the window and see a person in a hoodie across the street. I can’t see their face, I dunno who it is. Probably some neighborhood teenager just bored and skulking around. I raise my hand anyway. I smile. When I look again, the person is gone.

Alice: After college, our Sylvia moves to Portland, then Chicago. Works as a graphic designer, gets engaged, ends the engagement, gets engaged again and that one pans out. I get really into reading history. Keisha, ludicrously, takes up golf. [laughs] Keisha of all people! She says she likes walking in a nicely landscaped grassy area, and the game is just an excuse for that. I go with her once and then we both go regularly. Why not? Walking is nice.

I have nightmares almost every night about what we’ve seen. But I wake up each morning, every morning, next to my wife. And the moment I see her, I forget the  nightmares and step with her into the day.

Keisha: Years later still. We are old. And I guess I never thought that would happen to us. It didn’t happen in the mirror. In the mirror, it was always me and her, and we looked the same day after day. But it happened in retrospect, going through old photographs and realizing, oh. I don’t look like that anymore. That’s what I think I look like, but it’s not, is it? I look like an old person now.

Sylvia calls regularly, visits sometimes. I wish she would visit more, but it’s hard, her living across the country, and anyway what had we done all this for but so that she could go off and live her own life, free of danger?

This is where our road trip ends, I guess. The two of us in our living room on a day, any day. Nothing big happens on this day. There are no more revelations, no more astonishments, except those quiet revelations and astonishments of the heart. The daily magic trick of two people in love. They happen when one of us looks up, sees the other and thinks, “Oh my god, I love her.” And every time it’s like a secret that we’re told anew.

We lived more after that day, of course. Years. And then we died. I don’t know what to tell you, it was gonna happen eventually. But I never forgot. Not one day, not one hour, not one minute. I never forgot how lucky I was. I wouldn’t have lived any other life.

Watcher: I never thought much before about the moon. But I found myself looking at it, and it was beautiful. What a strange assortment of factors led to this perfect gray and white circle of radiance? I could look at it for hours. Maybe I will. I’ve got time.

I’m sorry. You thought I was dead. I was probably, I don’t really know how all this works, I woke up in a bush by a highway. I always wake up on the roads. They’re where I belong. They’re the lifeblood of what I do. If I had a name, my name would be Thistle. But I have no name.

Later I would need to collect the car from some person who though they were gonna see tomorrow. There was time for that too, so I walked along the highway, enjoyed how cold the night was, and for the first time, I took a long look at the moon. Beautiful. Eventually I got myself a car, and then a place to live. Everything’s there for the taking if you get the folks who used to own them out of the way. After I had my situation settled, I rested. I dunno how long it takes me to rest, but I guess years? Certainly the world always changes by the time I’m feeling strong enough again. It’s a gut feeling. I don’t look at a calendar, just whenever I feel that strength start to pulse back through me, I know I’ll be heading out again, doing it all over. I start hanging out at truck stops and roadside bars. I meet a man whose views are a lot like mine and I whisper a few suggestions in his ear. And that starts it. Soon enough he’ll come to me, his face made strange by the monstrous part of him. But ultimately it’ll be his choice. All this always is.

Damn, that moon though. I love that it’s barren and that it’s lifeless, and that it doesn’t even have its own light. It’s a rock. That’s all it is, a big rock with a location that came entirely by chance, but now it’s up there and, and it burns and defies simple ideas about what is alive and what is dead.

There are highs and there are lows. Right now I’m on my way to a high. I don’t mind the lows, but there is certainly something magical about those highs. I feel it as an itch in my palms. I feel it as a pressure behind my eyes.

It’s coming, that peak. And it’ll be worth that fall that comes after. I don’t hold anything against the cycle, the cycle is no more alive than the moon is, no more alive I suppose than I am, by certain definitions of the word “alive”. People can be so binary about those things.

Sometimes I see those oracles in their ridiculous hoodies, watching me. Praxis.

We met before, and we’ll meet again, and we’ll meet again after that. I’m a wave that sweeps in and pulls back, but is never gone. I’m a movement of water. I especially see that one oracle. That one has me a little worried. That one is so powerful. None of them have names, just as we don’t have names. But boy, I know her name. I’ll meet her again. And again.

But that moon! [chuckles] Ah, what an object. Maybe I’ll go there someday. Maybe I’ll sit up there for 300 years and stare back at this Earth, really let myself get hungry, and then I’ll come back. Because the dead return. Because the dead. Return.

Keisha and Alice. They never saw me again. The cycle I live by is much longer than any one person’s life could ever encompass. So they died, with their happy ending. For them it was permanent. As permanent as the Earth. As permanent as the moon.

Oh, Alice. I wanna start by saying… [chuckles evilly] [laughs evilly] Shit.

Joseph Fink: Once again, stay subscribed to this feed. We’re gonna have some fun stuff here leading up to the book’s release and beyond, and this will be one of the first places I’ll announce any new work I’m writing. And given how many things I have going on at any given time, you won’t have long to wait. Check out aliceisntdead.com for more information on this show, and our merch, like the Alice Isn’t Dead map of America, tracing Keisha’s three-season journey around our country, with hand drawn art of her many misadventures. Available in three different sizes, or get the memorable Alice Isn’t Dead logo as a shirt or an enamel pin. All of that at aliceisntdead.com.

This show would not be possible without our Patreon supports. I have so many left, and this is the last episode, so I’m just gonna list a bunch of them, here we go. Steven Smith, Ann Dean, Mark Standbrook, Kate Tierney, Liz Chrissy, Kellen Moira Connor, Daniel Levin, Brad (Jigair), Emily (Chinewsky), Eva Sun, Courtney (Tayborn), Sarah Furlong, and Jacob Barr. Thank you to all of you and to everyone I didn’t name, I’m sorry, there was only so many episodes.

Today’s quote: “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending”. From Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 9: Praxis.

Alice: This field was supposed to be a housing tract, back when houses went up faster than bad loans could be issued for them. Then it all collapsed and so did the company building the houses and the company that owned the land, and all got tied up in so much legal and financial wrangling that this dirt and concrete with a fallen-down chain link fence around it will stand vacant for another hundred years.

It was miles from the nearest town, but the contractor had started by building a road to it, so it wasn’t any problem for us to arrive.

All in all, Lucy had picked well for this confrontation. And as our ragtag group of Praxis faithful arrived in convoy, there was Lucy waiting for us. Behind her was a seething mass of Thistle Men, practically crawling over each other in anticipation of blood, and shouting wild welcomes at the arrivals. Already we were outnumbered, and that wasn’t counting for the difference in strength between a normal person and a Thistle Man.

Us? We had one Oracle who had once been named Sylvia and now, well now – I don’t know if they have a name. I dunno how that works.

I looked at Lucy, this woman I had once trusted completely, who had plucked me from a tedious but happy life into a great conflict for the good of humanity. A conflict that was a lie. “Hi Alice,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

I didn’t say anything back. There was nothing left to say.

Keisha: Earlier, just after dawn, we were waiting to leave and then what? We didn’t know. But we had a good sense. A lot of us were about to die, and we sat with that. We tried to make it OK. It wasn’t OK.

An older woman came over. She once worked at the front desk of the Duchess County Sheriff’s office in Poughkeepsie. “Hi Sharon,” I said. “You really got us into it with this, didn’t you?” she said. “Yeah, I suppose I did,” I said. “I lived a good life,” she said. “I thought maybe that would mean something. But now I’m just scared.” “It all means something,” I said, “even your fear.” We sat in silence for a bit. “I’ve thought it over and over, you know?” she said. “And in every possible version of this, I still give you that damn tape. [chuckles] Hmm. Shows how smart I am.”

Alice: There was a moment when we weren’t moving. And then there was a moment where we were. I don’t remember who moved first, probably the Oracle that had once been Sylvia. They had such speed now, there was a power to them, a crackle. All the Oracles had power but this transformation was so new it still bled energy like an open wound in space and time. I could feel it as they passed me, a waver in the air, a vibration in my stomach.

And they threw themselves into the army of Thistle Men, followed by our small and brave crowd of Praxis. I knew it wasn’t enough people, but we had a plan, and the plan was entirely out of our control.

So Keisha and I, we set our eyes on Lucy and we charged howling. If we died this day, we would die fighting for what we stood for. There are worse ways to end a life.

Keisha: Tonya had them laughing. He always did. There was an energy to Tonya, the kind that makes everyone relax, even when he seemed kind of keyed up. And he seemed more than a little keyed up this morning. “I hate waiting,” he said. “I would annoy the shit out of my softball team when I was waiting to go to bat. I just wanted it to be my turn.” He grinned. “Good athlete but a little too aggressive to be a good team mate. [chuckles] Story of my life.” “That’s not the whole story of your life,” I said. “No that’s true. But none of us are going to live to hear the whole one,” he said. “Which is fine. I like moving. I hate talking.” “You hate talking?” I said, poking him with an elbow. He laughed. “Well OK, you got me there. But that’s just me marking out time until I can get my hands on them. I’m ready. Oh, I’m ready.”

Alice: I went for Lucy first, and she was prepared for that. She had judged our relative anger, had realized I would feel the betrayal most keenly. Keisha only new her as a mysterious Bay and Creek commander, as a (-) [0:09:17]. But I knew Lucy as a friend.

So I went right for her face and she was ready. I was knocked to the ground with a quick kick to the knee, and then Lucy (went to stomp) on my throat. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by the ruthless speed with which she moved to kill me, but I was stunned. And then Keisha – oh Keisha. She grabbed Lucy in a chokehold, yanking her away from me. Lucy elbowed backwards into Keisha’s kidney, and Keisha collapsed, but I had gotten up by then and attacked, distracting Lucy enough for Keisha to pop her right in the base of her spine and Lucy was down. I felt triumphant, but Lucy lunged upwards a moment later, head first into my stomach. Air left me.

She was more than a match for the two of us. I hadn’t even had a chance to see how the rest of our group was doing. I heard the chorus hollering of the Thistle Men all around us.

Keisha: Daniel, who once had been a store clerk at the Easy Stop in Swansea, South Carolina. He couldn’t stop shivering. In the warm morning, he shivered and shivered. I put my arm around him. “I’m not scared,” he said. “Why the hell not?” I said, “the rest of us are.” “I’m not trying to be tough,” he said. “I’ve never been tough. But I don’t feel scared. I don’t feel anything. I think it’s all become motion for me. Everything that I’m supposed to feel, it’s instead evaporating out of me as a tremble.” “You have to teach me that trick sometime,” I said. He looked at his phone. “We’ve got around three hours left for me to teach you,” he said. “Then, who knows?” I didn’t respond, just wrapped my arm around him and absorbed some of his fierce vibration. We shook together, and he was right. It didn’t feel like fear. It felt like movement.

Alice: We were losing. I don’t know how else to say it, and it was only what we knew would happen, I suppose. None of us had expected to walk away from the day. We had dreamt our last dreams the night before.

Lucy looked more or less as she had when this fight had started, and Keisha and I were stumbling and groaning. Beyond us, the Oracle that had once been Sylvia could only do so much against so many Thistle Men. And the people who had come with us, well – what had we hoped for? I wondered for a moment.

But then, at the edge of the field, I saw another Oracle. And then a third Oracle next to them, and behind the Oracles, blurry in my sweat and blood smeared vision, I saw hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Even in the (swelling) of my pain, I felt redeeming joy. It was Praxis.

Keisha: Laurel smiled up at me, and I sat next to her. “What are you going to do after this?” I said. “Do you have plans?” she said. “Most definitively yes,” I said. “Hmm,” she said. “Don’t even start with ‘maybe in a better world’,” I said. “I’ve had some experience recently with wishing for a better world, and I don’t think one exists. We play the world we’re dealt.” “I’ll go back home probably,” she said. “I like it up there on the Cape. I like the way the sea smells sweeping up the cliffs. I like my job.” “Any sign of the black barge?” I said. “No,” she said. “No, I think it’s gone. I don’t look for it anymore. There was never anything to find anyway.” She squeezed my arm. “Keisha of my kinder world,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure and a heartbreak knowing you.”

Alice: There were those we organized and those organized by those we organized, and so on. A sprawling network all over the country, thousands of hands. And what if they all reached as one? And what if they all grasped? We were held together by a vision of the world. We had told Sylvia or the Oracle she had become our plan, and the Oracles had scattered out to every Praxis group in the country. They passed on the word: now was the time. Here was the place, and the people came. Or some of them, I don’t know what percentage of them came, enough I suppose.

They didn’t even know what they were coming to do. They moved on faith and on commitment to each other. Now they peered in horror at the bloody battle in front of them, realizing in that moment that far more was being asked of them than they had understood.

And then…

Then they continued to move forward. Some of them into a jog and then into a run, and they were charging. Ordinary people from ordinary places, and everything was being asked of them. And they were saying yes!

Keisha: Now here’s what I thought I’d never see. Ramon and Donna, late of a burger restaurant that followed me and Sylvia around the country. “Always nice to see your face!” said Donna, and Ramon nodded a gruff hello. “Surprised to see you,” I said. “I don’t know if this is the kind of Praxis you all were talking about, but it’s the kind we made.” “Ah, Praxis was never a centralized kind of organization,” said Donna. “This is as much Praxis as anything else.” “We will join you today,” said Ramon quietly. “It’s not a smart thing we’re doing,” I said. “Oh, Ramon and I aren’t smart,” Donna said, laughing. “Smart is overrated sometimes. We’re two pairs of hands, you know?”

Alice: This new crowd crested over the Thistle Men and they yelped in confusion. They were strong, but here were numbers, and the math became undeniable. Lucy glanced behind her, and I saw this like sag in her face. She seemed to search for some eloquent response to her situation. “Fuck,” she settled on.

Keisha started for Lucy with a steady and final posture. This was it for here. “Just because you have the crowds doesn’t change who you are,” said Lucy. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. You fight me, you’ll die.” Keisha barked a laugh. “Who I am? She said. “I’m afraid, but I’m going to do this anyway. And that’s who I am.”

I tried to find some strength to get to Lucy before Keisha, but already Keisha was upon her, and there was a flurry of arms and bloods and I couldn’t even see who had the upper hand until I knew it was Lucy. She was straddling Keisha, and she had a knife in her hand, and I was about to watch my wife die and I couldn’t get to her in time.

I just couldn’t.

Picture an hour a few hours before a storm, when the light goes heavy. Picture a plant dying for lack of rain, and the slow drift downwards of its dry limbs. Picture my wife’s heart beating, pushing life through her body. And I only wanted for it to keep beating. Please keep living!

Then Keisha tensed her body and flipped Lucy to the ground and before Lucy or I or anyone could have reacted, Keisha smashed Lucy’s head into the concrete foundation of a house that would never be built. Lucy’s eyes immediately went vacant, and her hands slipped loose (the knife).

But Keisha didn’t stop. Again and again, thomp, thomp. She rose, blood all over her. “I killed her,” she said. “You saved me,” I said. She did.

Keisha: “I just wanna feel useful,” said Sylvia. “I’m never useful.” This was a few nights before she changed. “I think you’ve been very useful,” I said. “Maybe. Or maybe there’s a difference between being useful and feeling useful.” “I don’t know if I would have been able to do half of what I did without your example,” I said. “That’s a sweet lie and don’t ever tell me the truth.” She smiled a sleepy smile. I wanna say that we had a long conversation. That we went through our childhoods and made promises that we couldn’t keep. But we didn’t. We sat in the silence of tired contentment.

I wish I could have protected her. But I guess I’ll have to accept that instead, she protected me.

Alice: It was over. I looked at the dead on the ground and I couldn’t recognize any of them. So many strangers who had come to die here at our feet. But not for us, for each other. I recognized that although we had been the catalyst, we were not the cause. It’s important to never get that confused.

And I’m lying, I did recognize a few of them. Some of those that came with us didn’t make it and I’m sorry. I’m not going to say who. Some were luckier than others. No one gave more than anyone else, and all should be honored.

Keisha: An Oracle whose name we once knew, but who now had no name, stood beside us. “Is it over?” I said. “For you, yes,” they said. “I am still fighting them. And I am meeting you for the first time. And I am hundreds of years from now. Everything I’m saying is only what I said in this moment. I can’t change a word.” “What if I tickled you?” I said. I don’t know where that joke came from. When you’re in shock, your brain twists on you. The Oracle laughed. “You don’t,” they said. “I don’t know what would have happened if you did. Keisha, I want you to know two things.” “What is it?” I said. “I feel of good use. That is the first. The second is this. Keisha, you can go home now. Go. Home.”

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, Chapter 8: “To Forgive”.

Alice: The meetings of what we now called Praxis continued. We met once every three months. This was not going to be a fast process. Oh, we had aged. Oh yes, almost a year and a half of this already. The battle was never going to be fast. The only way to overthrow power is by driving in the thinnest edge of the wedge and then methodically and constantly tapping it in for years. Until there’s enough leverage for what only looks from the outside like a sudden upheaval.

The meetings had taken on a religious aspect. Stories of the Oracles were now recited like encounters with angels. It wasn’t quite worship, but it wasn’t quite not. And we didn’t (deter) that. Worship and rituals can be tools, used for good or bad.

We realized that we couldn’t oversee the group entirely on our own, so we gave all of the people an assignment. Go back to where they were from and start their own Praxis group. Gather people around the same way we had. Start hundreds of these all over the country. We tapped that wedge in a little deeper.

Keisha: First I gave Sylvia some water and a bit to eat, but next I sat her down and wanted to hear where in hell she had been all this time, and if she had found anything. “Yes and no,” she said. She had gone looking for the Oracles, just like she said she would. Just like we did. And like us, she discovered quick that the Oracles are only findable when they choose to be found. There’s no stumbling on them. They come to you. Still she visited every dusty roadside stop that hadn’t seen action since the 70’s, and she poked into the corners in the back rooms. She started to get a sense for the kind of places that they were drawn to.

She discovered, like us, that even when finally encountered, the Oracles had difficulty communicating with people who experienced through such a fundamentally different filter. The more she found and talked to them, the more she felt it was most similar to the way her mind worked when she first woke up. When her thoughts were flat and straddled what was real and unreal equally. So she would meditate for hours in the mornings, trying to hold onto and extend that way of thinking, so that she might be able to understand the Oracles better.

But ultimately, she realized that the Oracles were a cause. They existed to fight back Thistle and everything that Thistle stood for. They were a purpose more than a creature. And so she realized that while she wouldn’t be able to understand them enough to help them, she could go on continuing their purpose herself. It was all she had ever cared about. This struggle was the core and soul of her.

“And I knew,” Sylvia said, “that if I wanted to be there for the fight, I had to come to you, Keisha. Because for whatever reason, you’re where that fight ends up.”

The motel we stay at is full of high school kids on a trip, to learn how to make it in the country music business. Like any city devoted to a specific entertainment industry, like LA to the movies or New York to the theater, or Las Vegas to upper despair, Nashville has a hole at the heart of it that everything in the city slopes toward.

Alice: I wasn’t there for this, so this is what I heard. A coffee shop past closing. The owner let the folks use it because she herself was a member. This was one of hundreds of small Praxis groups started by one of the original faithful. In this case, it was Daniel, who once manned the counter at the Easy Stop in Swansea. He told the others again about what we had told them, passing along our stories as best he could remember, and like anyone sort of making it up any time he needed to fill the gaps. In this way, our story spread. In much less of a direct fashion than a big headline, but in a way that people would actually receive.

Then the others told their own stories. In the hush of that half-darkened coffee shop, they shared what they had seen that hadn’t been possible and definitely hadn’t been right. But had been real. They felt the utter relief of being believed.

Keisha: “It’s all gonna end soon,” said Sylvia. And I felt every connotation of good and bad she meant by that. This was coming to a head, even though we had no real way of knowing what that would mean. “I’m just glad we could all be together for that,” I said. “Yeah man,” she said. “The three of us scattered out real good. I guess this would have to be the end, right? How else would we have ever gotten it together to be in the same place at the same time?” “What was that name you used it to go by as a teenager?” I said. “Forget it,” she said. “Skip, right?” [chuckle] “Nobody calls me Skip anymore.” “Alright,” I said. She took my hand. “You can call me Skip if you want. [scoffs] Shit, you can call me whatever. I know what you mean by it.” I put my arm around her, this runaway teenager who I would never be able to protect as much as she deserved. We sat like that for a long while, but we couldn’t sit like that forever. Couldn’t do anything forever.

Alice: “I don’t know how this will turn out,” Keisha said. “I don’t know if there will be an after, but there might be, and so we need to talk about what comes next.” “OK,” I said with real fear. We had stayed together because we had a mission, because there was a great struggle and we were on the same side. That kind of energy can paper over a lot of dysfunction and pain. If we made it through this, maybe there wouldn’t be an us left to talk about. And maybe Keisha knew it. I dreaded this conversation, but I had a lot of experience in my life of facing what I dread. So I sat down and I listened. Keisha took a long breath with her eyes closed. And then she looked at me with a calm determination, someone who had moved past indecision and had landed, for good or bad, on their way forward. “I forgive you,” she said. “I forgive you completely.” [chuckles] I felt this wash of happiness, and also surprise because they were not the words I was expecting, but she brushed aside my hand as I moved it toward her. “I’m not finished,” she said.

The members of those smaller Praxis groups were asked to start their own groups. Now the regional became the local. Most towns of any size had a Praxis group, some as small as three or four, others in the hundreds meeting in community centers and parks, in libraries and diners. We didn’t know all the details. For instance, we didn’t know what had happened to the story. The story that we had told our group, and then the members of our groups had told their groups and so on and so on.

The story had changed. It had become less an oral history and more a religious text. We had become prophets or minor deities. There were the Oracles and they were powerful beings that many had started to worship. But there were also the stories of Keisha and Alice, who controlled the Oracles, who could fight off Thistle Men singlehandedly, who would one day come and raise up the entire country against the monster that strangled it.

I-I dunno what we would have done with that story if we had known about it. But in the end, all that can be controlled is what you do. What others think about what you do is out of your hands. It was out of our hands.

Keisha: It had been over two years of this slow growth. Praxis had unfolded from a word whispered in weird corners into a tangible movement of people, a quiet gathering ready to explode into the open. And it wasn’t lost on Thistle or on Bay and Creek.

In that motel room in Nashville, a piece of paper slid under the door. Against the curtain, the shambling shadow of a misshapen man. We prepared for a fight, but it was quiet for a long time, and so I picked up the paper.

“Alice,” it said. “We should talk. It doesn’t have to be like this. Meet me at” and here it gave directions to a remote location in southern Indiana. The paper was signed “Lucy”. “They’re ready to end this,” said Alice. “Yeah,” I said. “Put out the call. What we’ve been preparing for. It’s here.”

“I’m not finished,” I said to Alice. “I’m not forgiving you for your sake. I need you to hear all of this, not just the parts you want to hear. I don’t know if you deserve forgiveness, and maybe I don’t care. Maybe there isn’t some great balance sheet where the equation of guilt can be figured until it’s all equal on both sides. And maybe it’s just what the person who has hurt feels, right or wrong. And if so then – I don’t wanna think about what you deserve. I wanna think about what I deserve.” I paused. The heaviest part was out of me now, and I could see clear through to the finish. “I deserve to live a happy life,” I said. “I deserve to have my wife who I love at my side. I deserve to wake easy in the morning and to fall asleep easy at night. I deserve to not have what you did intruding into our lives. So I want you to understand this: in order to have what I deserve, I must forgive you. But I’m not forgiving you for you. I’m forgiving you because it’s what I deserve.”

She nodded, in understanding and agreement. And there was a moment of tension. But I had forgiven her and I meant it. I leaned forward and she leaned forward and we met in the middle in maybe the best kiss we’ve ever had. Our bodies collapsed together with the gravity of everything we felt.

I had been holding my breath for years. I opened my mouth. I breathed in. [deep breath] This is love. This is what it’s made of.

The night before Indiana. I don’t know Lucy’s plan but I can guess. I don’t know who will stand on our side, but I can hope.

There is a knock, and Sylvia calls out through the door. I open it and she’s standing in the motel walkway, looking not herself under fluorescent glare. “I feel so strange,” she said. I guided her in. Alice came over and concerned. Sylvia looked seriously ill. I had never seen her face like that. I didn’t know what was happening. And then Sylvia fell to the ground and began to tremble. Tears splashed off her face as she shook. “I understand,” she said. “I understand.”

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, Chapter 7: “Speakers”.

Keisha: We had decided to organize. It is an overwhelming goal to organize a country, but it starts with the people around you. And so we reached out where we could. To the network of safe houses and anarchist groups that Sylvia had connected us to, if we needed to reach out to her.

We let it be known that if anyone had experiences which left them with the feeling there was something seriously wrong with this place, had encountered monsters or strange phenomena on the highways or on the quiet streets of their towns. They were to meet us. We set a date, a month from then, in a park in upstate New York. Near where I had last seen Sylvia.

Maybe I hoped it would make it more likely than Sylvia would join. But I didn’t let myself consciously think that. Instead, we tried to show up with no expectations at all. Just whatever came of it was what we had to work with, and we would start there.

There were bout 30 people. Most were fairly local, but some had driven across the country to be there. Among the crowd, I noticed the woman from the front desk of the Duchess County sheriff’s office in Poughkeepsie, the one who had slipped Sylvia and I a tape showing what really happened the night Sylvia’s mother had died. I smiled at her and she smiled too and then looked away.

There was a general sense that we were all embarrassed to be there. That nothing we were doing here could lead to any higher process. This wasn’t an army gathering, but children dressing in their parents’ clothes.

The last person to arrive was a short man in a baseball cap with a confident walk. He gave us both firm handshakes. “Hi, I’m Tanya,” he said. “We spoke once. I passed on a message from Sylvia. I have to tell you, it’s about fucking time someone did this. I’m real excited. I am real excited.” And for the first time, I allowed myself to be excited too.

Sylvia never showed.

Alice: At a fried fish place near Baton Rouge, we get to talking to a table of folks. Dyed hair, weird clothes, they stood out as much on the road as we did. It was a touring theater group. They told us that they liked to tour to the south, because in the little towns, the people that need their performances really need them. They told us that it’s good, as an artist, to be useful to people in some practical concrete way. Otherwise, what’s the point of art?

Keisha: We told them about the drive-through in StLouis and they got real quiet. “So you came across one of the speakers.” The person who spoke was tall, had said their name was (Lian) and then hadn’t said much else. “The speakers?” I said. “Some of those old fast food drive-throughs that have been out of business for a while,” said another one. “If they leave the speaker system there,” said (Lian), “the word is that it sometimes connects with other worlds.” “Aliens,” said Alice, with a degree of skepticism that frankly, I didn’t think our personal experience over the last few years gave us license to hold. “No, not that kind of other word,” said (Lian), “more like Stephen King. You know, The Dark Tower? There are other worlds than these. Those speakers transmit from other versions of our world.” “Or that’s what they say,” said one of the others, trying to laugh through the long hair over her face, but not making it convincing. “We heard it once,” said “(Lian). “We were parked by an abandoned Burger King eating some sandwiches and the speakers switched on. I got close, I listened.” “What did you hear?” I said. (Lian) bit their lip, shook their head. Soon after, the group politely said goodbye. “Well,” said Alice. “Man, this isn’t even close to the weirdest thing,” I said back.

Alice: As Keisha drove, I asked her a question that maybe had been living in both of our heads during this time. Were the Oracles even really on our side? What were their intentions? And if they were helping us, why? Keisha gave the only answer she could, which was that she didn’t know. We couldn’t know. We could only believe. And belief is an uncomfortable function, no matter how natural it may be to the human mind.

And yet I do. I believe in the Oracles. I believe that they are good. I could always be wrong.

Keisha: We were west to Lubbock when I saw the Taco Bell with the missing letters from its sign. Clearly not having served as an actual purveyor of food for quite some time. I glanced over at Alice and she nodded, and I was already turning toward the exist.

We pulled into the lot. There were no fences, just a sign in the vacant windows letting us know we could rent 1,500 square feet of restaurant space, and to call a number that had been completely scribbled over with sharpie. We walked over to the drive-through system and sat on the curb. I don’t know what we were waiting for exactly, but we waited.

Alice: And a few minutes later, we heard the soft purr of static, a signal springing to life. As one, we rose and leaned into the old mesh of the speaker, set into its little kiosk under a 90’s era bell design. For a moment, there was a scramble of voices amid the static. And then, as we moved closer, it seemed to react to our bodies and became sharper, until I heard a definable voice and I threw my hands to my mouth. Because it was my own voice.

“You wanna do pizza night tonight?” I asked from the speaker. “Sure, let’s make a shopping list.” Now it was Keisha’s voice. We met eyes, didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

Keisha: It was a conversation. A domestic conversation, like we had had so many times. But there were certain references. Mentions of what was happening on the news, it was all more or less what was currently happening right then.

And I realized, we were hearing an us in which Alice never left. In which I never had go to looking for her, in which Thistle never entered our lives.

We were hearing an us that had never gone through any of what we had gone through, and we could listen in, from this grass-studded curb off a North Texas highway.

Alice: On our third meeting, the crowd had more than doubled. We had never advertised openly past our first meeting, instead asking people to reach out to people they knew. In this way, we had grown quickly. This meeting was in the parking lot of a mostly out of business mall in the upper Midwest. Straggles tricked in over the course of an hour and we let them. Because people were mostly coming in from long distances now.

Keisha: Still no Sylvia, but occasionally I would recognize a face. One really had me wondering for a while until I put my finger on it. The cashier at the Easy Stop in Swansea, South Carolina, when Sylvia and I had come through looking for the police officer who said he would help her.

The cashier had clearly seen some aspect of Thistle, and it had affected him deeply. I greeted him and he murmured: “You asked me if I wanted to live in a world where what I saw was possible, and I thought a long time about that. And I don’t. I don’t.” He nodded, more amen than agreement, and faded back into the crowd.

Another face I knew: Laurel, a coast guard officer from the mouth of the Columbia River. A woman whose brother and nephew had both disappeared onto a black barge that swallowed the people who had gone investigating it. Laurel drew me into a hug as soon as she saw me. “I’m really glad you came,” I said. She glanced over at Alice. “Oh well,” Laurel said. “Maybe in a different life. Maybe in a kinder world.” She squeezed my arm. “I’m so glad you’re doing this.”

Alice: OK, who was that?

Keisha: Any time on our journeys that we saw an empty fast food place, which was fairly often in an economy still staggering under what was done to it ten years ago. We would stop and we would listen.

It was us. It was Alice and I, to use Laurel’s phrase, in a kinder world. A world where none of this had happened.

It would make me cry every time. Alice would just go quiet. In rain and in dry hot air, and during the day and at night, we got sucked into listening. The work we were doing, the organizing of this group, it felt less and less real to me. This was real. Our voices floating barely above the texture of the static, echoing out from speakers plugged into nothing, under menus with prices years out of date.

Alice: It scared me. It felt like a ghost story, but we – the us on the road - were the ghosts. And then there was this other us in the speakers. Those two in there were the ones who had lived. And we hadn’t somehow.

We had left our lives behind and now we haunted ourselves. We sat under a speakers in southern Utah, in a town that was hardly a town anymore, and I looked up at the full moon and heard us discuss who had lost in a TV cooking competition that night and I thought, none of this is real.

And I meant us. I meant us sitting there.

Keisha: Alice driving now, and I asked her another one of the central questions of our new lives. “What even are the Oracles? Where did they come from?” Time traveling beings with no faces, who turned strange the mundane roadside stops they lurk at. Who did they serve? Alice laughs and gives me the only answer any of us have. “How the fuck would I know?”

Alice: Finally we stopped moving around the country. Other than where we needed to go to the meetings we had set up. We would find a drive-through and then we would stay there. Because what else could we be doing but to listen to this? We ate and we slept and we listened. We hardly talked. Those other versions of ourselves talked for us.

Keisha: But then, one night. Alice had nodded off and I was still up listening to us walking back to our car after a date. Tired, easy flirtation with no stakes to it. The kind that happens after years together, where the tension can be switched on and off in any given moment.

Then I heard us get in the car and I heard the car leave. But the signal did not follow. I continued to hear the parking lot. People coming and going. Most sounded drunk. It was evening, I would guess. The signal had never left us before. It had always focused in on us. But I kept listening with a pit in my stomach, because I felt that I was being shown something, and it wasn’t something that I wanted to be shown.

I shook Alice awake.

Alice: I didn’t know what I was hearing. Keisha filled me in. it sounded like nothing, like everyday life, but we sat in dead silence, listening. And then we heard a man screaming. We heard him pleading. “Look at all those people in there,” a different voice cut through the static, as though the owner of the voice was standing next to us, and we jumped. Because it was the voice of the Thistle Man, the first that Keisha had met. “I want you to look at them in there, right through those windows in that lit building, and not one of them knows that you’re about to die.” A whimper. “No one’s going to help you,” he said. And he was right. We listened to him being right for several horrible minutes, and then the signal cut out with a squeal.

Keisha: I hadn’t thought about it, or if I did I assumed the world we were hearing was a world without troubles. That we had been able to float carefree through our lives because it was a better place. But in that moment, I knew. The world we were listening to had the same Thistle, the same monstrous problem at the heart of it. The actual difference was that in that other world, the two of us weren’t doing anything about it. We were letting it happen, so that we could live our quiet lives. In that world, we too were part of the monster.

We never listened to the abandoned drive-throughs again. This is the world we live in, so this is the world we’ll change.

Alice: Now in our tenth meeting, the size of the crowd was getting a little out of hand. People were hungry for it. they wanted someone to tell them they weren’t alone in what they had seen, and they wanted some way forward on what to do about it. We didn’t know if we had that exactly, but we thought that if we worked together, we could find it. We needed to rent sound systems to hold the meetings. The energy was amazing.

Keisha: As always, we started by calling on the crowd to share stories or what they had seen. Of strange men with sagging faces. Of powerful beings disguised as humans wearing hoodies. A thing seen on the roads that didn’t fit into the narrative this country had made for itself. There is a power in telling your own stories. The ones we knew were true, the ones we hadn’t realized anyone else would believe.

I didn’t know what we had here, not yet. But I knew it was real. I felt the crackle of it. I thought it could be what took is through to the end, whatever that end may be.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 6: “This Isn’t It”.

Alice: Keisha screamed and pounded the ceiling of the cab. She sounded the truck horn, which was less like a holler of happiness and more like an enormous calf (lowing) for its mother. A mournful sound that prophesized what would happen to us next. But in that moment, we were carried by the raw feeling of it.

She didn’t know what to do with her hands, which was a little scary because she was the one driving. The truck (wagged) with her celebratory movements. “Careful!” I said. But I felt myself jumping in own skin, too. Who had time for careful when this much happiness was there for us to grab.

Keisha: We’re done. That’s what I was thinking. What the air in my mouth tasted like. What every sound that came from my mouth said. Even when I was too excited to form them into words. We are done! We get to go home. And before us, a life. Not that our problems would be fixed overnight. Even in my giddy moments, I didn’t believe in magic, not the sorcerer kind. But I did believe in magic as it exists. Sleight of hand, a triumph of human ingenuity and determination. Someone staring into a mirror, eyes bleary, in their third hour of practicing the same simple (palming) of a coin. I believed in the magic of hard work and sacrifice, and hadn’t we worked hard? And hadn’t we sacrificed?

Alice: I thought to turn on the radio and hear the result of what we had done. Someone sang to us in Spanish over a fluttering guitar, a song about a forest that was actually about a marriage. I spun the dial. Finally a news station. The markets were up, or maybe they were down, I couldn’t see how it could possibly matter.   “Why aren’t they talking about this?” Keisha asked, and I didn’t have an answer for her. I kept searching. Ah, another news station. The latest on a contentious mayoral race in Philadelphia.

What was happening? The world had been broken open, but life was going on as though it hadn’t.

Keisha: I pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a diner. I needed to see that this was having an effect on people. It had to. It had to.

We went inside and a smiling woman told us to sit anywhere. The TVs were on. Two movie stars were getting married, and there was live coverage of the ceremony. On another channel, the president was flying to Phoenix to talk jobs numbers.

Nothing about Bay and Creek, or about Thistle. Nothing about the government’s complicity and murder after murder. “Hey,” I said to a man at the counter. He looked up at me with the expression of anyone when they were annoyed by a stranger. “Yeah?” he said. “What do you think of this stuff that came out?” I asked. “The government funding a secret program? Serial killers living on military bases?” His eyebrows fluttered, concerned. He put up his hands placatingly. “I-I don’t go much into politics,” he said. I didn’t know what to say to that.

Alice: I had less hope than Keisha going in, because my career in this area had guarded me against hope, but even I couldn’t believe what was happening here. “Hey!” I shouted. “Do none of you read the news? Didn’t you see your government is conspiring against you?” We were asked quite energetically to leave the diner. I might have grabbed a guy’s shirt and shaking him, I don’t recall. For the next hour, I resembled a character from a cheap science fiction movie, running up to folks on the street and asking them to acknowledge the horror in the news, and none of them would. They set their eyes straight. They kept moving. “What is wrong with all of you?” screamed. “What is wrong with all of you?”

But it appeared from the outside that they were fine. The question that the world had was, hey what’s wrong with you?

Keisha: I sat in the truck. I reached within myself and found only despair. I had thought it was a matter of knowledge. That if all of them only knew. But that wasn’t it at all. What I realized in that moment, in that truck, is that all of them already had known.

OK, maybe not the specifics, not the names, but the shape of it. Oh, they had known the shape of it for a long time. It is possible to know something and then choose to not know it. And all of us, all of us together had known and then chosen not to know. So giving them the information had only confirmed their chosen ignorance.

That set us wondering. What was left? That had been our plan. There hadn’t been a backup. I didn’t see a way forward. So we just moved forward. Moved for months. Months of driving back and forth across the country, without a clear idea of what even we were doing anymore, why we were even still out here.

What was left for us? For anyone who hoped for the good out of this country?

A month after, out in the desert near Slab City, where something monstrous sleeps under the sand and the cargo trains howl through the long empty, and the golf courses dot out over the wasteland. And the Los Angeles department of water and power, that greedy giant, builds its power plants and its miles and miles of lines, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air conditioning to Malibu.

We go for a hike in the Native American land near Palm Springs. A man sits by the trail a few miles up into the hills.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” he says as we pass. “It really is,” says Alice. “They can’t take that away from us, can they? Ha ha ha,” he said.

I think about whose land we’re on and how that story went. But I nod because – what else could I do?

Alice: Two months later. Easter, North Carolina. Not quite the seaside but not the urbane research triangle either. Here there are farms and boarded up main streets, but signs still of life. A giant bird painted on the side of an old brick building. The animal’s proportions and posture awkward, but its scale magnificent. A faux retro motel with pastel paints in its windows, a monument to color against the farm dirt planes.

We stop and eat our lunch on the side of the road watching a farmer use a tremendous machine to plow acres and acres of field on his own. He has headphones on. I wonder which true crime podcast he’s listening to.

We started to talk about after. Not after our victory, but after our surrender. What if we gave up? What if we just found some quiet place to live out our lives, away from a war we could never win? It could be the two of us again, and we could live knowing but choosing not to know about the brutality left behind. There could be peace in giving up.

Keisha: Three months later, we pass through Louisville, where I don’t drink bourbon and don’t see Horse (one), but do eat some good Ethiopian food at a place downtown with white plastic tables. It comes served in a  styrofoam takeout box, the injera folded over and under the stews. Here in the far far north of the south – really only the south in name, since it sits on the border with Indiana, which we can agree is one of the least southern states. Louisville is closer to Detroit than it is to Atlanta.

The cook comes out for a smoke break, nods politely at us as we eat the food he just made. “It’s delicious,” I say to him. He smiles. “Family recipes. Three generations.” He nods at his northern city and its southern clothes. “A couple decades ago, none of them would eat it. And now they want to make sure it’s authentic enough.” He shrugs.

Alice: Four months later in Chicago. Chicago looks like a seaside town, which is a real trick for the Midwest.

But that lake. I had grown up thinking “lake” and envisioning the puddles I swam in at camp, but this is an expanse. Even from the top of the Magnificent Mile skyscrapers, you still can’t see the other side. It holds frost within it, so even in that sweaty summer air, approaching it is like touching ice. You can feel the cold lift off of it from 20 feet away.

A woman comes directly from the jogging path on the shore and flings herself into the freezing water. “Ah!” she shouts at us. “Oh shit,” I say back. “It feels amazing,” she says. “Really?” I say. “Or terrible,” she says. But the kind of terrible that’s amazing.” She slaps the water and screams again.

Keisha: We drive. And as we drive, I realize. We’re not alone. All of these people, all of these people in all of these places, they are waiting to be good. They are waiting for the world to be good. What they need is a way forward.

It’s not that they’re choosing not to know. It’s that they don’t know what to do with what they know. I had thought it was a matter of knowledge, but it’s a matter of organization. It’s a matter of Praxis.

I thought about a woman slapping her palms upon Lake Michigan, and a man cooking food from Ethiopia in a rust belt city of Bourbon. I thought about the people that come to the desert in California because they have nothing, and the people who come to the desert because they have everything. And the people who come to the desert, because out past the highways, you can cause all sorts of trouble. I thought about people who grow food in North Carolina, digging their hands into the dirt, and you sit down to eat with the smell of soil lingering on their palms.

We are a country defined more by distance than by culture. But that distance is defined by the people in it. We give context to our miles. We are the fine parts that make up the heavy machine that heaves global events forward.

I thought about hands. I thought about thousands and millions of hands, reaching for the spatula on our eight at the grill top of a diner, and reaching into a toilet at hour twelve at the gas station, and reaching up to put the can of beans on the shelf at the supermarket, and reaching down to help their child cross the street.

I thought about millions of hands and what they could do if they all reached the same direction and grasped. And that’s when I knew. It was as clear to me as a memory, as unshakeable as my own breath. We were going to organize, starting with us and moving from there.

This was a country made up of a distance of people, and they could not be changed through headlines. They had to be organized, one by one by one. 

And maybe some part of me had spent the last year waiting for Praxis to save us. But not anymore. We would have to become Praxis ourselves.

That was it. That was it then.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, Chapter 5: “What Happened to Hank Thompson”.

Keisha: The seasoned fries didn’t come. We had been tricked. But still, at least we were sitting there, talking with an Oracle. So that’s something. Not fries, but something. “This conversation was nice,” said the Oracle. “I talk to people so rarely.” “We just started,” I said. “Let’s see how nice it gets.” “Right,” they said. “We just started.” “There are a lot of questions we would love to get answered,” Alice said. “For instance, what is Thistle, hmm? Where did those monsters come from?” “All of your questions will be answered,” said the Oracle. “Or already have been. Or won’t be. Those are the three possibilities.” “You can see the future,” I said ignoring their joke, if it was a joke. “I interact with time differently than you,” they said. “For me, everything is always happening, all at once. I do not see the future. I am currently experiencing the future, as strongly as I am experiencing this moment, and as strongly as I am currently experiencing the past. At all times, I have to maintain what I have already done, so it will continue to have happened. It is exhausting. You weren’t going to ask me how I feel, but there’s an answer for you.” “What about Thistle?” prompted Alice. “Ahh, Thistllllllllllle,” the Oracle sighed.

Alice: Hank Thompson wasn’t taught to hate, he came to it naturally. As a teenager, most of his classmates looked like him and this seemed right to him. At the time, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why it felt right, although later in life he would develop his own logic to explain it, one based on a patchwork of bad science and bad theology. He only knew that the few classmates that weren’t like him made him furious. He did everything he could to make their lives miserable. Others in his class weren’t as directly cruel, although they tolerated what Hank did and this was its own cruelty.

After school, Hank would sometimes follow classmates who weren’t like him home, shouting insults and tossing rocks. He wanted them afraid. Not only in the school or the streets but to generally feel there was nowhere safe. He wanted them to live with a tremble, because he hated them.

Once he connected with a thrown rock, aimed at a child two grades below him named Theodore. Theodore crumbled instantly, and an accusatory finger in blood stuck toward Hank. Hank walked away, leaving Theodore in the street. Hank never heard what happened and never cared to ask, but he never saw Theodore in school again. This made him proud.

When Hank was 16 years old, he was shaving in an old mirror out in the yard, and he noticed something on his cheek. A flap of skin. He poked at it, but there was no pain, just some extra skin. He ignored it and hoped it would go away on its own.

Keisha: Once a few years into our relationship, Alice and I went to a wedding in upstate New York. Lake Placid. We flew through Chicago and then into Albany, and drove the few hours north from there.

In certain parts of the country, it’s always snowing a little bit. For instance, I have never crossed the Michigan border without finding myself driving through a light dusting of snow. Even in a late spring visit once, there was an unseasonable blizzard. Upstate New York isn’t quite that, but there is a noticeable slip in temperature the closer you get to Canada. The north of the United States is such a frozen place in my imagination that I am sometimes startled by the recognition that every city in Canada is even further north. Their south is our north. I couldn’t do it, man. I’m more of a mild weather person. There is something simultaneously exotic and bleak about the salt on the roads, the rumbling scrape of the municipal plows.

As we drove up through the mountains into Lake Placid, we passed frozen waterfalls dotted with ice climbers dressed head to toe in pastel snow ware. Like inexplicable flowers growing from the walls of ice.

“It would certainly be easier to think of Thistle as monsters, said the Oracle. “If the Thistle men aren’t monsters, then what would you call them?” I said. The Oracle nodded, as if I had made a statement they agreed with, rather than asked them a question. “A feeling made manifest,” they said. “Why can’t you ever speak plainly?” I said. The Oracle hunched over their hands upon the table. “I am speaking as plainly as I can,” they said. “Human language is designed for those who experience time in a linear way. One second, and then another, and never repeating a second once it’s gone. It is difficult for me to adapt such language to the way I exist. I can’t remember what I’ve already told you, or what you will be told but not yet. From my point of view, you’ve already learned everything you are ever going to learn. I just am not sure what parts are now, and what parts are later.” “What are you?” said Alice. “What are the Oracles?” The Oracle looked at her from within the shadows of their hoodie. They seemed to be weighing an answer. “Order of fries here?” A man standing over our table with a basket of seasoned fries. “Sorry it took so long, I uh, I didn’t even know this part of the restaurant existed. Does that make sense?” “Not really,” I said, taking the fries from him. “But I wouldn’t worry about it. I think the problem will solve itself.” He nodded absently and wandered away through the nauseatingly stretched Denny’s. I tried a fry. They had gone cold during his search for us.

Alice: As the years went on, other pockets of skin joined the one on Hank’s cheek. The area around his eyes grew dark and baggy and then started to droop, exposing the pink around the bottom. The whites of his eyes were slowly tinging yellow. He didn’t go to a doctor about this, he didn’t trust doctors, because he thought that most of them were secretly Jews. He thought a lot of people must secretly be Jewish, and it made him boil. One side of his face started to travel towards the ground and the other drifted upwards. Looking in the mirror, he didn’t recognize the creature looking back. He tried to say his name at the strange reflection. “Snarf,” he said, “Flem-mm”. He carefully set his tongue and his teeth and enunciated his own name. “Marm,” he said. He didn’t look at a mirror again for a long time.

Decades arrived and went. Hank did not age, although his face and his body became stranger and stranger to him. He devoted himself to the feeling of hatred and to the power of being feared. One night, he went one step farther and murdered a man out back of a supermarket.

The killing felt natural, and it made him angry. He started tearing into the man with his teeth and, surprised and horrified at this, he fled home.

The hotel on our vacation years ago overlooked Lake Placid, which freezes over entirely in the winter. This fascinated Keisha. [chuckling] She insisted on going for a walk on the ice just because she could. She had never seen a lake freeze so solid that it could be driven on.

But despite the knowledge of its stability, there is a small element of terror to walking on ice. No matter how solid it is, there is always the possibility that it isn’t.

We went dog-sledding around the lake. Keisha didn’t like any of the other winter sports, but she did like sitting in a sled and looking at dogs. [chuckles] I don’t blame her. Looking at dogs is one of the better sports.

She sat behind me, wrapped her hands around me. I hold onto that memory. The way it felt, the way I felt.

Keisha: Alice wanted to go skiing and I wanted to try skiing. I thought there was a chance I’d like it. Who knows, miracles happen. So I booked a lesson, gamely renting my equipment. But as soon as we go to that rental process, before I had even touched a ski, I knew I would hate it. All this equipment, people barking questions at me about size and style, and wincing in irritation when I indicated with my hands that I didn’t know, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.

Then I put on the boots and discovered that skiing involves wearing punishment shoes that make walking difficult and the basic fact of having feet painful. But still I tried. I did what the instructor said. Later after the lesson, Alice went up on some of the slopes on her own, and I stayed by the lodge, trudging my way up a small rise and gamely attempting to ski down it, over and over, sweat pouring down beneath my snow suit. Because once I decide to do something, I do it.

“The Thistle Men are a feeling made manifest?” I said, bringing the Oracle back to their earlier point. “It is easy to think of bad men as not human. They are animals, we say. They are monsters, we say.” The Oracle shrugged. “Comforting lies. If those who commit atrocities are an entirely different species than humans, then you could never be complicit. These impulses would not exist within you. But they do. The bad is as human as the good.” “What are you telling us”? said Alice. “What is deeply felt on the inside can make itself known on the outside. We can believe so deeply in an idea that we are changed.” “The Thistle Men.” The Oracle laughed, a discomforting jangle. “Hahahahaha. Mere men after all.

Alice: Hank looked again in the mirror, a different mirror from the last time he had looked, in a different home. It was many years later. He wasn’t even sure he was human anymore. He looked so unlike himself. Blood stained his teeth, but under the scarlet, the enamel was a dull sickly yellow. He howled at his reflection and his voice didn’t sound like the voice he had once had. It sounded powerful and big. He felt feared. “Hah,” he said. “Pap.” He no longer tried to turn these sounds into words, they meant what he said.

Hank walked out of his house, leaving the front door open. He never returned. It took weeks for his disappearance to be noticed.

The creature he had become walked with its now boneless legs along the highways. When he felt his energy fade, he would murder someone, anyone, it didn’t matter who. And this would give him the energy for another week or two’s walk. He did not question for a moment what he was doing or what he had become. The Thistle Man, Vector-8. But also still Hank Thompson.

Finally, months into his journey, he was drawn by an unrefusable instinct into an air force base in southern California and a walled compound within it. A gate opened up in those walls, opened by other creatures like him. And unknown decades after his birth Hank, who no longer could remember his name enough to say it, stumbled cackling into the home that had been waiting for him all along.

Keisha: We made our way out of that Denny’s, and two hours of late night highway later I get an email. From Tamara Levitts at the LA Times. Her story is going up in a few hours.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 4: “Three Nights at the Old Motel”.

Keisha: Every minute we were visible to the public was a liability. Each passerby a possible member of Bay and Creek. And who knew what forms Thistle could take that we hadn’t discovered yet? So we found the Triumph Tiki Inn, on a highway that had been emptied by a nearby interstate bypass.

The motel reminded me of one I’d seen in a town called Charlatan, but I shook that off. This was not Charlatan. It looked like no human had set foot on the motel grounds in at least two decades. And so we pulled the truck into the lot out back, unpacked the supplies we’d stocked up with, and prepared to wait a while.

That night I saw a light in one of the rooms. It didn’t seem possible. I doubted anyone had paid an electric bill since the turn of the millennium. I even doubted whether the power lines along this stretch were serviced anymore. But there it was. Hmm. Maybe a local generator? A squatter. I wasn’t scared. Squatters mostly mean no harm. And after all, we too were squatters.

A little later, I saw a person up on the balcony outside of the room. I figured they had seen me, so I shouted “hey” to them, and he shouted “hey” back and waved me up. I went.

He was a middle-aged man with a few days of stubble, but his clothes were clean and well taken care of. “Cigarette?” he said. “Nah”, I said. He shrugged and lit himself one. “I’m Howard,” he said. “Keisha,” I said. “What brings you here, Howard?” “[scoffs] What brings anyone to a place like this?” he said. “Circumstances in my life are what they are. This place isn’t bad, truth be told, but I wish the service was a little better.” The service? What was he talking about? “Feels like housekeeping hasn’t come by in days,” he said. “I could use a fresh towel, I’ll tell you that.” I looked about me at the sagging building, missing most of its window panes and several of its doors.

Alice: Keisha went for a walk, but I stayed by the truck. I didn’t like this place, it was creepy. I had seen what waited in abandoned places and I had no interest in exploring them more than I needed to.

But I also wanted to keep us safe.

While Keisha was gone, I saw movement near the front desk. I couldn’t quite see the details, probably a possum or something. I thought for a moment it was a person spinning in place, but it was hard to say what I saw.

I picked my way carefully through the broken front window and into the lobby. It looked like someone had tossed all the furniture a few times in the air. Time truly wrecks all.

There was no one in the lobby, of course, and no movement. My eyes had tricked me. Or that’s what I was thinking when I heard the music.

Keisha: “It’s my wife and I,” Howard said shaking his head. “The usual difficulties, but it seems best I move in here for a while. Just to cool things off, you know? I miss the kids though, like a wound. It’s physical.” “I’m sorry to hear.” “Oh no need to be sorry,” he said. “Just a thing that happens, you know. [sighs] It’s nice to have some neighbors. This place is so quiet usually. I don’t know how they stay in business. But that’ll change real soon. My wife’s gonna bring the kids, and I’m gonna take them down to the pool. Haven’t been able to take them to a pool in years. I apologize if the kids playing there ends up loud, you know how kids are, but I hope you’ll think about how happy it makes me and feel some forgiveness.”

I looked at the pool area. The pool was empty and badly cracked up. There was a single lounge chair that the wind had tangled with the chain link fence. “Uh, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Have a good night,” I said. “You too,” he said. “Don’t be a stranger.” He tossed the cigarette, went back into the room. The light shut off and it looked to all the world like an abandoned motel again. But I could still smell his smoke.

Alice: String, classical music. Sounded like a ballet maybe. It was coming from the pool. The music glitched and warped and occasionally looped back on itself, repeating the last several seconds and then jittering ahead.

I didn’t like that music. I decided to return to the truck.

When Keisha came back, I wanted so badly to put my arm around her. But I didn’t. She was right: she didn’t need me to protect her.

Keisha: During the next day, we didn’t do much. I read, Alice sat in one of our folding lawn chairs and watched the broken window of the lobby. Seemed weird, but I didn’t ask. Honestly, we weren’t talking much just then.

That night, the light in Howard’s room was on again, and I could see the firefly of the cigarette flitting around in front of his face. Although it was dark enough that I couldn’t see him. I climbed up the stairs to the second floor walkway. He nodded as I approached, but didn’t say anything. Just glared out at the empty parking lot. “Everything OK there, Howard?” I asked. He sighed, threw the cigarette down and ground it out with his foot. “Huh. She was supposed to bring the kids and she didn’t, you know? I’m in a bad place, Keisha, I’ll tell you the truth.” “Well,” I said. Well, I-I’m sure she’ll bring them eventually.” “I dunno,” he said. “See, she was the one that screwed up first. That’s the thing about all this, I was in the right, you know? But I savored it too much. Righteousness is a powerful drug. There can be something dangerously addictive about being the justifiably angry one in an argument, you know?” “Yeah,” I said, “Maybe.”

Alice: I heard the music again, and this time I went to see. That was always my job: to turn toward the terror and choose to witness it. Because if we don’t look at what is bad about our world, how will we ever fix it?

The music swooned and jumped, the strings sliding nauseatingly up and down. I approached the chain link of the pool area. From there, the empty pool was maybe 20 feet away. I saw that movement again, a person spinning in place. It was a woman in an old dress, torn at the bottom, streaked in mud. She had her hands over her head in a vague approximation of a ballet pose. Her arms were very long, her fingers were crooked, broken maybe. She stopped spinning and took a leap, legs splayed out, landing on her knees and stumbling back up.

Keisha: “I shut her out,” Howard said. “Thought that would punish her. But it just made matters worse. That was me fucking up. Now we are both fucked up and then what? There was no winning, no up side, we had both lost, and now I wait here for her to bring the kids, and she never brings them.” “Well you should go home and try talking to her,” I said. “Or at least talk to the kids.” “I should do that. You’re right about that, Keisha, I should do that. Hey, maybe I will.” He started toward the door in vigor, but slumped against it when he reached it. “It’s no use,” he said. “She isn’t going to forgive me and I’m not going to forgive her. Feels like we’re stuck like this. No way out for either of us.” He sighed, his breath ragged with the tears he was holding back. “Good night,” he said. “I wish I could have been better company.” He went inside. The light instantly shut off.  

Alice: I took a quiet step back. My sleeve was caught on the chain link, and the fence rattled as it pulled away. The woman stopped and the music stopped in the same moment. She looked directly at me and I saw her face. Oh god, her face.

People say that bad experiences are like nightmares. This wasn’t a nightmare. What I remember most about it was how real it was. Even as it happened, I noticed that most. 

She dropped to all fours, her arms exactly as long as her legs, and she ran toward me right up the side of the empty floor. I turned and fled, didn’t stop until I got to the truck. When I looked, there was no one behind me. I heard the music again, back at the pool.

I tried to talk to Keisha about it. “I think we should leave,” I said, “hole up somewhere else. “Uh, I like it here,” she said. “Let’s stay a little while. Just a night or two more.” I didn’t wanna start an argument. I made sure our cab was locked before we went to sleep.

Keisha: Once, I was in a budget hotel. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all the same. The same institutional carpet, the same rubbery boiled eggs at breakfast. The same wi-fi able to download three entire emails per minute. I needed a shower and a decent nap, and so I splurged on a stay. As I walked along my door, I passed a room that’s door had been left open. I looked in, and it was the same layout and furniture as all the rooms. Every room in the hotel was identical. But this room was full of televisions. All over the bed and the floor, piled up on the table. On the ledge of the window. Hundreds of TVs.

I kept walking, it didn’t mean anything. And yet I think about that room regularly. The room full of TVs. These moments stick with us.

I was waiting for Howard when he came out that night. “Hey,” he said quietly. He lit his cigarette and stood like an admonished little boy. “I’m sorry about last night. I got upset and I shouldn’t have.” “Man it’s fine,” I said. “How you feeling?” “Oh I feel alright.” He leaned against the railing. “I just have to be more patient, you know? She’ll bring the kids soon enough, and then I’ll take them down to the pool, and it’s gonna be such a fun day. Maybe you and your wife can join.” “We’re moving on tomorrow first thing,” I said. “Too bad. But I understand. Not a lot of life left in this place. I’m sure folks like you have better things to do than wait around in this backwater. Unlike me.” He laughed. “I got no better things to do at all.”

Alice: When I heard the music that night, I walked to the fence around that pool knowing what I would see. And there was the woman again, in the same muddy torn dress, spinning and flailing around as that music dipped and wavered horribly. This time the sound I made wasn’t accidental. This time I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then said at a normal conversational volume: “Hi”.

Keisha: “It was nice having you as a neighbor, Howard.” “Shit, it was wonderful having the company. Hey you be safe on those roads, OK? I don’t have to tell you how dangerous they can be.” There was one name that came up again and again in the weird pockets of highways like this. “Howard? Does the name Praxis mean anything to you?” He laughed again. “Ha! Maybe,” he said. “But it’s not the kind of thing that can be talked about. It’s more of a thing you do, you know?” He looked at me closely. “Maybe you don’t know. Well I’m sure you will soon.” “You’ll be OK, Howard?” “I’m gonna be fine, just fine. My kids are coming soon. I can’t wait. You have a nice night.” He went to his door. “Hey, Howard?” I said. “Yes, Keisha?” “You say hi to your kids for me, OK?” He smiled. “I absolutely will.” And he went back into the room. The light went out. I would never see him again.

Alice: Once more, she stopped and the music fell silent in the same instant. She looked at me, and again her… Oh god, her face.

She fell to all fours with her long, long arms and she galloped toward me. But I did not run. In the movies, people always run from ghosts, and I always wondered, what could they actually do to you? Sure, they look terrifying, but what specifically was a ghost going to do to you if they caught you? I suspected nothing worse than what a human being could do to you, and I’d survived a lot of that. If you ask dangerous questions, you will get dangerous answers. But sometimes we need dangerous answers.

So I stood my ground. She flew across the cracked pavement, reached the fence and then stopped again. She smelled like old paper. She unfolded herself slowly upwards and I realized how tall she was, several feet taller than me. Her face was exponentially worse this close up. We met eyes for a long silence and I saw tears. She shook and shook and she held out her hand and I took it. Her hand felt like old paper. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for staying even if just for a moment.” Her voice sounded like old paper. We stayed that way, her and I, in a long quiet. And then she took her hand away, and she flopped over onto her side and rolled slowly back toward the pool and then over the edge. I didn’t hear her land, and I didn’t see her in the pool. I walked back to the truck.

The music was gone. I would never hear it again.

Keisha: That next morning, we pointed the truck at the dawn and started driving out into this country defined as much by distance as culture. That silence that had laid heavily over us for so long was still there. But it was different. Instead of a wall we had built between ourselves, it felt like a shared obstacle that together we could overcome.

I looked at Alice and she looked at me. We both smiled. I put my hand on her hand, and she put her other hand in mine, and we drove in silence, holding hands, for a long time. We were different after the motel. I don’t think the rest of this road trip would have happened as it did, without those three nights.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, Chapter 3: “Means of Escape”.

Alice: I don’t know where this trip started, what counts as the first moment, but for lack of a better answer, I’ll start with this. I’ll start with the amazing painted rocks.

I needed to pee, and it seemed a more interesting stop than a fast food place. As I was coming back from the bathroom, I went to look at the rocks, because why not, right? I was there.

They were better than they had looked when Keisha and I came back years later, but not by much. They were rocks, they were painted. They delivered on both fronts. As I stood there, I noticed movement on the rise above the rocks, a person thrashing around. Choking maybe, or a heart attack. No, not a person, two people. A man attacking a woman.

I have anxiety too, I don’t know if Keisha ever knew that. But my anxiety doesn’t turn inwards. I project it. I see the whole world as being as scared as I am, and I get this irresistible urge to come to its defense.

So I ran up that hill and attacked the man. His skin was baggy and his teeth were sharp. He was strong.

I had misunderstood my abilities in this situation. But the woman who he had attacked clambered to her feet and together we fought him. She pulled a knife from her belt, stabbed him through the throat. He gurgled, leaked yellow pus and fell to the ground.

I couldn’t move. We had killed someone. But the woman, she didn’t look at the man we had killed, she looked only at me. “My name is Lucy,” she said, “and most people wouldn’t have done what you just did. We could use a woman like you. How would you feel about a job?

Keisha: A patter of hands on the outside of the trailer. Gravity made wild moves. They were pushing the trailer back and forth, tipping it over just for the fun of knocking us around before the real violence began.

The body of the oracle we had come to see fell sideways onto the mattress, and then slumped to the floor as light and small as a child. I started toward them, but what would be the point? They were gone. Soon we would be too.

[howls] “Ahoooooooooooooo!” said a voice from the outside. [spitty] “Lumffffffffffffffffff,” shouted another. The Thistle Men were getting excited.

I took Alice’s hand, I kept my eyes on the body of the oracle, and then the oracle was alive again. They were still limp on the ground but also simultaneously standing over their own body. [whispers] “I’m already dead! Run! RUN!” the oracle said. And then there was only the body.

In my head, I saw a black boat floating forever at the mouth of a river. I pulled Alice with me out of the trailer. There were at least 20 Thistle men and they cheered upon seeing us, but I concentrated on a gap in their number and I made for the SUV. I wasn’t ten feet away when I saw the SUV had been disabled. Tires slashed, steering wheel sitting in the passenger seat.

The exhaustion of my despair was mixed with an adrenaline jolt of fear. Behind us, the Thistle Men flapped their lips as they tore toward us, making a strange jittering sound.

Alice: I took the job. If there were monsters in the world, then I couldn’t pretend everything was fine. I have the urge always to protect, and so I followed that urge.

It was torture hiding it from Keisha. But I had already been going regularly on business trips. I kept the same schedule, but instead of selling bathroom supplies to large office clients, Lucy and I hunted down the Thistle Men.

When we weren’t working, Lucy trained me. Hand to hand combat, first aid, target shooting, basic tactics. The tedious step by tiny step nature of detective work. Most of all, she trained me to trust her.

It was the murder of Bernard Hamilton when it happened. We were looking over the body and I thought, “Oh my god. This feels normal. This feels like a day on any job.”

And I didn’t recognize myself, this person who was so used to violence. My heart surged. I couldn’t breathe. I was in a panic over how calm I was. I didn’t let it show. I kept doing the job.

It went on this way for years, maybe could have gone that way forever, but circumstances changed and my double life became untenable.

Keisha: The Thistle Men were on us and we kicked and pushed them, pulling each other along, staying just ahead of their grasping hands. There was an old sedan, a boxy 90’s model. The tires were low, looked like it barely run. One of the vehicles that Thistle had arrived with, presumably. We made it to the car, and the keys were in the ignition. Alice fought off a particularly fast Thistle Man, and then fell backwards into the car next to me.

“This is in (all wheel drive)”, I said. “How did they even get this out here?” but there was no time to consider that, I could only do my best to steer it away from any ruts or patches of heavy sand that would snare it.

I pointed it toward the highway and started driving. Soon we were a good mile away, and I was able to start breathing again. “Foolish,” I said. “Just foolish.” “At least we’re safe,” said Alice, and I went to slap her shoulder for jinxing us, when the car ran right into a hole I hadn’t seen and stopped dead. I tried to start it, but whatever dark power had kept its old engine together was done. The car was done.

Alice: Thistle was going after family members. Lucy told it to me plain with a minimum of emotion. She never got emotionally invested in much. She wasn’t cold, just – practical.

The family members of Bay and Creek operatives were being found out and murdered. Word wasn’t coming down from the top, because they didn’t want panic, but Lucy thought I should know.

The choice was simple to me. I needed to leave Bay and Creek. I believed in what we were doing, believed in the importance of our fight, but Keisha was (all of it) for me, and I wasn’t gonna give her up.

“It won’t work,” Lucy told me. “Thistle won’t care if you’re still active, they’re in it for the carnage, not the strategy. And how much worse will it be without Bay and Creek’s protection?” I didn’t know what to do. I stopped sleeping, mostly stopped eating. I had joined because I wanted Keisha and everyone like her to be safe, and now my actions had put her in even more danger than before.

Lucy kept bringing me stories, more Bay and Creek operatives dead. Chaos in the head office. No one knew what to do.

That last time I left home, I thought I would come back. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Keisha, who was frightened about even the minutia of daily living. Having to face one of those boneless loose-skinned boogeymen? She would be helpless, and it would be my fault. I would indirectly be her murdered.

So I didn’t come back. It destroyed me. But I am a protector, I had to remove myself from Keisha’s life, letting her think that I had died. I just didn’t know any other way to do it.

Keisha: We had been walking for two hours and still no highway. I was staring to lose sense of direction. For all I knew, we were heading deeper into the wilderness. The afternoon heat was brutal. We had no water, and so we carried our thirst in our bodies. Thirst is heavy. It made us slow, made us stoop. The howls of the Thistle Men came from all sides. Hooting and laughing and whooping. We couldn’t tell distance at all. They could be right upon us or miles back.

I stopped, looked back at Alice. What were we doing? If this was it, did we want to spend the end wandering purposelessly? “Keep going,” she said. [sighs] “Keep going where?” I said. I searched out surroundings, not recognizing any landmark. And then, I saw a glint against the horizon and pointed at it before I knew what I was looking at. I thought of a time in Death Valley, a light in the sky above the Badlands. Alice laughed in relief. “A reflection off a car,” she said. “It’s the highway. [sighs] Oh, thank god you saw that.” “Yeah,” I said, “Thank god.” I don’t know what I saw.

We were so close to the highway, maybe 40 more feet, when I heard Alice gasp. I turned. A Thistle Man, his crooked baggy face grinning at me, as he squeezed his arm around my wife’s throat.

Alice: It felt as though the part of me that was human was gone. What is a person outside of the context of others? As George Eliot wrote: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” Stripped of that, I still ate and breathed and shit, but I was not Alice. And I wanted nothing more than to be Alice.

I took no comfort in my hollowness, there is nothing romantic about it. It was a sickness, and I had left the only cure behind. Home was a person and I wanted to go home.

“How would you explain it to her?” Lucy said to me. “Where would you say you’ve been?” “I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ll figure it out.” “No,” Lucy said. “You try to explain it to me, right now, out loud. Where you’ve been as though you were talking to Keisha. I wanna hear the story you’d tell.” Of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t. The conversation ended there.

Month passed, then one day I considered a sight that had become ubiquitous in my life. The news crews covering the violent event we were investigating that day. In my despair, I stopped and I watched the crew film. Without allowing myself to think about what I was doing, I pushed my way through and stood at the front of the crowd of onlookers and I stared straight into the camera. Hoping that somehow, Keisha would end up on the other side of the stare.

Lucy was furious, as you can imagine. But I didn’t stop. A fire outside of Tacoma. Landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in Saint Joseph. I kept doing it. Would I have done if it I had known it would lead Keisha to doing what she did? Probably not. I had sacrificed everything to keep her safe, and here my impulsiveness sent her careening out into the most dangerous places of all.

Keisha: [breathless] “Run,” said Alice. “Just run, please!” The Thistle Man snorted. It sounded like a boot pulling out of mud. [terrifying] “Yeah, run chipmunk,” he oozed. “Run away.” Branches cracking interview eh brush around us, yelps close by. Alice was sobbing and she was mouthing “go” over and over as the ropey arms circled her tighter and tighter.

Well fuck that and fuck the Thistle Men! I charged toward him, howling back sounding for all the world like one of them. I had become more than willing to meet their violence with my own, and I had learned a thing or two about how to do that. Alice thrashed as her oxygen was fully cut off, but I was already driving my thumbs into both of the Thistle Man’s eyes, pushing inward and upward as hard as I could, until I felt them squish beneath me. He screamed and let Alice loose, thrashing blindly at me. His hand connected with my head once then twice, and the world went away for a moment. I couldn’t hear out of one ear, I could hardly see.

Alice regained her breath, went in for a kick but caught the rebound from one of his swings and was on the ground again. He turned, sensing her vulnerability, and I used that moment to heft a rock and take it to him, over and over until he was down, Alive but incapacitated, in a puddle of that yellow glob that fills their bodies. “Hffffffffffffff,” he shouted at me. “Woooooooooooooooo.” I used the rock one last time, right onto his face, and he didn’t say anything after that. “We have to go,” I said to Alice, pulling her up. “I’ll help you,” she said, trying to put her arm around me and I could almost laugh. Almost. “Hun, you can hardly walk. I will be helping you.” I could hear out of my one good ear that the rest of the Thistle Men were upon us. I pulled us the last 30 feet to the highway, where I began wildly waving for help. a truck driver stopped and I hurriedly but successfully convinced him that we were one of his kind and just needed to get a ride to whatever the next town was.

From there, we were able to rent another car. We got the nicest one they had, because we knew that our line of credit would be burned anyway once the other rental company realized they weren’t getting their car back. So might as well run up that bill if we were gonna skip out on it.

The nicest one they had was only OK. It was a small town agency. And from there, back to Midland and our truck.

As we pulled up to our home on the road ,I stopped the car and turned to Alice. “I saved you,” I said. “I saved you, OK? So go ahead, kid yourself that everything you did was because I needed protection and so that justifies it somehow. But you remember this. you remember that I saved you and not the other way around.” I got out of the car and into our truck, and from there we went out of town and onto Texas, and onto whatever was gonna happen to us next.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 2: “Surrounding”.

Keisha and Alice: [singing] Things are good or so I hear, this bottle of Stevens awakens ancient feelings!

Keisha: [laughs hysterically]

Alice: [singing] Like father, stepfather, the sun is drowning in the floooooood!

--

Alice: There was a name that had come up over and over in both of our journeys: PRAXIS. We knew little about them, except they stood in opposition to both Bay and Creek and Thistle. So we did what anyone would do. We Googled them. And there wasn’t much. Then we did what more people should do, and we asked a librarian, a nice woman named Mercy outside of Tulsa. She looked through a catalogue, found references throughout historical texts. As long as America as a concept has existed, there were peripheral mentions of both Praxis and Thistle. Although that didn’t tell us what they were or how to find them.

Keisha: I took Alice with me back to a beach in Florida, where once there had been a factory. The name on the factory had been Praxis, and they couldn’t just scoop up a factory and disappear, could they? Except apparently they could. The beach was empty. There was no sign of any structure having been there. I double-checked the route, made sure I’d led us to the right stretch of coast. And it made sense. There was no way factory could have been there. Who builds a factory on the sand, stretching out into the sea?

Only I remember it. I remember having been there. I remember Praxis.

Being good at long distance travel means turning yourself as much as possible into cargo. The more you can become like, say, a cardboard box, the better you are at withstanding the miles. A cardboard box doesn’t need to pee. A cardboard box doesn’t need to stretch its legs. A cardboard box only sits and is transported. And that is how a person becomes good at long road trips. They sit and are transported. They take the world as it comes. A road trip is often seen as an exercise in freedom, but the effect it has on a person is a placating stillness.

Alice: I love long distance travel. It takes you out of yourself. There’s this saying, right, wherever you go there you are. And it’s true, there’s no destination far enough that your own faults won’t follow. But what I think the saying misses is that other cliché: it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Because while it’s you who leaves a place, and you who arrives in a place, right? It isn’t necessarily you in between. The you who sits on the road is a different you, one with far less responsibilities. One whose choices have been narrowed down to which exit to stop at, what music to listen to for the next 100 miles. It’s freeing, being taken out of yourself and replaced by this road version. And yes, it’s tiring when you arrive and your worn out, stressed self has to step back into her place, but those moments in between? Those are worth it. Those road hours are the one bit of freedom we get, and the reason we feel like that is because they take away most of our freedom. Sometimes the less options we have, the more free we feel.

Keisha: This constant road trip has done something to me. It’s changed time. Used to be an hour and a half drive felt like a while. The kind of drive you need to gear up for, the kind which would make you dull and listless with the length of it. Now four or five hours move by with a real pep to them. I’ve learned that all it takes is sitting and existing. Exist long enough and anything will be over.

Alice: We hear it again and again, whispered by folks three drinks deep in roadside bars and buried in the footnotes of peer-reviewed papers. We hear about the oracles. There are, they say, oracles on these roads, and although the connection isn’t clear, wherever there is activity from Praxis, there appears to also be oracles. Mouthpieces maybe, or messengers. Whatever they are, we do our best to track an oracle down. It is said they live in roadside places, in the bathrooms at gas station, at commuter parking lots and outback of highway fast food franchises. We put it out there on the whisper network of weirdos and freaks and outsiders like us that we’re looing for an oracle.

Keisha: Together, we track back through all the locations where Sylvia and I saw Ramon and Donna and their traveling burger restaurant. The one called Praxis. But all of the locations are still empty. Which is its own kind of odd. Because wouldn’t at least one of them been rented by another company in the ensuing months? But they haven’t been. All of them are still vacant. At the last one we visit, I ran my hand down a window, feel the name Praxis, where its been peeled up from the glass. State after state of highway, chasing after this vanish restaurant. In Pennsylvania, we pass a billboard which looks familiar, for a dog groomer. “Decadent Dogs”, it says.

Alice: We still haven’t talked about why I left, not really. I don’t know how to tell her the story without reopening the hurt. So we talk about other matters. And often we don’t talk.

Keisha: She’ll tell me when she’s ready. Until then, I have enough to keep me busy. I love her, but I only have so much I can worry about at once. It’s like when we used to make bread together. You can’t force a dough to rise. You leave it and it rises. You can’t speed that up.

Alice: And word comes back through the whisper network. We’re told the source might be Sylvia herself, that runaway teenager friend of Keisha’s, the one who disappeared searching for the oracles and whatever power they represent. It’s (Tonyah) in Omaha who calls us. “Can’t promise this came from Sylvia,” (Tonyah) says. He snorts. “That’s the word on the line, but providence can be a shifty question once it’s been through so many mouths. His voice changes, becomes softer and a little worried. “I don’t know who you are, what you’re doin’. But if you’re on the same path as Sylvia, please be careful. We need every one of us.” I say back: “I try, best I can do.” “Best any of us ever can,” he says. “OK Alice, goodbye now”. We discuss the risks but there isn’t much we can do about them. And so we head to Texas.

It’s just 200 miles from Dallas to Austin, but it’s 200 miles of construction site. What exactly do they think they’ll improve with all of this work? It slows the traffic down constantly, turning what would be two hours into half a day or more. We go in the middle of the night, and even then our (phones) have to take us on an exciting tour of residential streets and (-) [0:11:53] roads, trying to find our way around complete closures of the only highway.

Keisha: One aspect of road trips has changed tremendously. Used to be you saw some sort of rundown roadside bar or half-empty business. You just have to wonder and imagine what it was like in there. What kind of people were its customers, what kind of people ran it? It led to all sorts of flights of fancy.

Now though, you can look up reviews online of literally anything. See pictures of the food. Turns out the abandoned-looking barbecue joint, tucked into a temporary-looking structure on a gravel lot by the highway, is some legendary place people drive hours to eat at. What hides in abandoned places and all that. Outside of Dallas, we drive by this huge and breathtakingly seedy sex store. I’ve talked before about how, for a country so prudish, we are remarkably prudent with our sex stores. But because it’s now, I can check out the internet reviews of the seedy sex warehouse on the outskirts of Dallas. Turns out people feel like they charge too much for their weekly swingers nights. [chuckles] Well they won’t stay open for long with reviews like that.

Alice: Like the gates of heaven unfolding off the Texas highway, Buc-ee’s. The truck stop that other truck stops dream of. They make their own sodas, their own snacks, their own chips and pretzels. The building itself is the size of a small suburb, acres and acres of T-shirts and stuffed animals and beverage fridge wall spanning into the distance. Billboards from miles before and after announce: “Buc-ee’s has the cleanest bathrooms in America.” [chuckles] I haven’t tried all the bathrooms in America, so I’m going to have to believe them. Every toilet has its own dispenser of hand sanitizers, right in the stall. In case a woman on the go doesn’t have to pause to wash her hands. American convenience in the ultimate of all convenience stores.

Keisha stepped outside at the Buc-ee’s to call Tamara with LA Times again. She’s been checking in regularly. We gave her all we had and obviously she was skeptical, but what was she was able to confirm checked out so quickly, she was willing to let us keep sending her what we’ve found. Which is what we’ve done. Everything we learn goes to the paper, and they do their best to confirm it from their end. I hope this works out, because sometimes I feel like Keisha has penned our whole salvation on the truth setting us free.

Keisha: The highway was miles back. The ground here is flat, almost to the horizon. Sunbaked, waterless, a single Aistream trailer there in this middle of nowhere. Here waits our oracle.

Alice: In one sense, seems ridiculous to me an oracle would live in an Airstream. But also, I can’t think of a more appropriate place for an oracle in these American roads. I admire their taste.

Keisha: We left the truck. It’s not designed for off-roading. I considered walking, but Alice correctly pointed out that while it was walkable temperatures in the pre-dawn hours, it wasn’t gonna be smart to try to walk once day had broken. So we rented a four-wheel drive in Midland, hoping it would see us through. It’s gotten us this far.

Alice: Before we left the car, I stopped her. I don’t know why. Some part of me said I couldn’t even do one more risky act without telling her. And so I just spilled it. I told her the entire story of my leaving, why I did it, why I couldn’t come home.

Keisha: As soon as she was done talking, I slammed the door and headed to our rented SUV. “Hey,” she shouted after me. “Hey!” I let her shout.  

Alice: We parked outside the Airstream. Keisha reaches for the door and I step past her and I open it. She’s earned the right to be the first to confront this mystery, but I can’t take the chance that there’s danger on the other side of the door.

Keisha: That really pisses me off! [scoffs] She pushes past me like I didn’t take care of myself for years! If she had wanted to protect me, she is many highway months too late.

Alice: It’s wood-paneled from the inside. There’s a record player by the door and a pile of old records. Mostly folk music, some David Bowie. The records have gotten wet somehow and are warped. I don’t know how they got wet in this place where it never rains.

Keisha: There’s a sink. I try the handle. No water, of course. Where would it be attached to?

Alice: But then, how did those records get so wet?

Keisha: Beyond the sink is a bed. Sitting on the bed is a person in a grey hoodie, hood pulled up. Their face is lost in the shadow. But I think I know now I can get as close as I want to to that hood, and still wouldn’t be able to see a face.

(I sit) on the edge of the bed, body toward us, a hand on each thigh. I expect to feel a wave of powerful energy coming off of them, but I don’t.

Alice: A cloud passes over the sun. It gets dim in the trailer.

Keisha: “We’ve come a long way to talk to you,” I say. They say nothing back. Anxiety is working my gut. But it does the same when I’m ordering pancakes at a truck stop, when I’m getting up to pee in the middle of the night. I can’t trust my anxiety.

Alice: But there were no clouds in the sky.

Keisha: “Hello?” I say. Silly. If they wanted to respond, they would. I reach out, hesitant but knowing what I need to do.

I touch them. They slump backwards. The oracle is dead.

Alice: From outside, I hear a wet huffing and (whopping). I don’t even have to look out the window to know…

Keisha: The trailer is surrounded by Thistle Men.

Alice: Because I sit next to her in this truck, day after day after week after week. Who needs a radio when I can put out my hand and rest it gently on her arm or her leg and let my touch communicate all we’re still unable to say.

It isn’t the same between us, not yet. But I’m willing to wait it out until I’ve made it right. I hope all of this that we’ve been through was worth it.

Keisha: Nothing ever could be.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole and Erica Livingston. Produced by Disparition. Part 3, chapter 1: Cause and Effect.

Keisha: We arrived in Arizona, at the amazing painted rocks, a miracle of art. Two explanation points in the name, if you’re counting. I doubt it was much of an impressive attraction when it was open, and now years into abandonment, the desert must be claiming its own. Whatever paint had been on the rocks was peeling. It looked like they had gotten sick, their natural color with this off-putting pallor.

Alice didn’t look much better. She kept glancing around those paint-faded rocks in the former ticket booth that was no home to a family of lizards, like an ambush was waiting for her in this abandonment.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ve been here before. I don’t wanna talk about it.” [gasps] “Of course you don’t,” I said. Of course she didn’t. I didn’t push. I didn’t care. How many secrets am I supposed to care about at once? I did a lap around the place. There wasn’t much to it. A parking lot cracked and covered in dirt. The ticket booth and the once painted rocks. The bathrooms, surprisingly still pretty clean, but I doubted the plumbing worked, so I left them alone. I didn’t search too closely. I knew there was something hidden in that place, but I didn’t need to find it.

Alice: We’ve left Arizona now, the job is done. Gotta get out of state for a bit. Going to the coast, straight west to water and then turn north. On the 101 south of Santa Barbara there are oil rigs out on the water. Like giants from a monster movie, stepping up out of the depths.

Keisha: Tucked into the hills along the road, I see the fire of a refinery, burning constant and hot. Strange against the lush post-rain greenery.

Alice: There was so much hidden at the amazing paint rocks. Physically hidden, but also hidden there was story I’m not ready to tell her. How am I supposed to explain how the gut bottom shock of that place nearly took me off my feet when I stepped out of the truck? Because she hadn’t told me where we were going, because she didn’t think it mattered. Because she didn’t know that if my story had a first sentence, then that first sentence took place there.

My secret is buried there along with whatever else they’ve put into earth, but it will have to stay buried. We have a job to do, right? And not a lot of time to do it.

So we got this stuff from the trailer, carefully, we’ve been really careful with al of this. But the moment you get confidence in your own care, that’s when you slip up. That’s when it all goes. So we didn’t take any of it for granted. We checked for any possible trip hazards before taking every step. We split up, went through the place, laying down what we had throughout. We didn’t talk as we worked. There was some pointing, facial expressions indicating yes or no or how the fuck should I know, figure it out on your own.

I don’t know if it would have made a difference when we talked. But we didn’t.

Keisha: South of Santa Barbara is the town of La Conchita, tucked between the highway and the hill side. Which is, in California, a dangerous place to be. Landslides have been reported here for well over a century. It might be this stretch of land was cleared out specifically to put some distance between the hills and the railroad tracks. And yet people filled that margin with houses. And then a town.

Alice: The first major landslide of modern times happened in 1995. The town was declared a geological hazard area. Everyone knew it was going to happen again, but they stayed. Then in 2005, even more of the hillside collapsed, killing ten people. A report from the US government said that, quote, “no part of the community can be considered safe from landslides”. And yet, La Conchita still has a population of over 300.

Keisha: I shouldn’t judge, no one should. We all do lots of things we shouldn’t though. It’s hard to walk away from something you put your whole life into, even if you know it may end up killing you.

Once all the elements were in place, we went through and double-checked. We didn’t have a lot of time, but not much point in doing this if we’re not doing it right. So we cross-checked each other’s work. Then we went back to the truck, not in the parking lot, parked way farther back. Because we still hadn’t quite worked out the safe for this kind of stuff. We went there and we pulled out the cell phone I bought at a gas station two states away. I asked Alice if she was ready. She said she was. I thought about Earl, murdered outside of a diner by the Thistle men. Murdered as I ran away.

I can never make up for that. But maybe I can make small steps in the right direction. So I pressed the call button. The amazing painted rocks, a miracle of art!! Too explanation points in all blew up. The rocks with traces of paint on them, those bathrooms still somehow clean. The deteriorating parking lot. The ticket booth and – yeah, I did feel bad about the lizards, but every war is going to have its casualties.

We watched the remnants rain back down to earth, and then we got on the truck and got out of there before someone from the highway noticed, and tried to figure out which authority you call about a bunch of rocks blowing up in the middle of nowhere.

Alice: Walking along the beach in Santa Barbara, and there’s two old men sitting on a wall between the sidewalk and the sand. One lights a cigarette and the other one says, “Those cause cancer,” and the smoker says: “Cigarettes don’t cause cancer, people cause cancer.” And then he laughs for a long, long time.

I buy a smoothie with whey protein in it half a block away and drink it with my feet in the sand, looking out at the water.

Keisha: I miss home. But home isn’t a place, home is a person. I wanna go home, but I am home.

Alice: Sometimes folks on TV call us the Derelict Bombers, but mostly they don’t know what to say about us. What kind of message are we spending by bombing empty buildings and abandoned roadside stops? We’ve never even come close to hurting a person, and all the places we blow up, no one is even clear who owns them, having been so long since anyone did anything with them.

We don’t worry about what the journalists think we’re doing. The message is not for them.

Five months since I pulled her out of that underground base. Five months of living like this. Parking the truck far from the highway behind trees and brush. Living always as wanted people. Never turning our faces fully to a stranger.

Keisha: We found each other. We’re both here. Now what? Now we turn to open war.

It took us a couple of months to learn enough and gather the materials so we felt we could pull off these bombings reliably. Because we’re not interested in accidentally blowing ourselves up. We’re in this for the long haul, and we can take the time to learn what we’re doing.

A lot of Googling from public libraries and looking formulas up in physical books, so we shouldn’t set off any flags from those that monitor us all. And once we felt confident, we went and blew up our first Bay and Creek base entrance. They have these hidden bases everywhere, and once you know what you’re looking for, it’s relatively easy to find them. Abandoned place near to a highway, with murky ownership leading through shell company after shell company.

What waits in the abandoned places? We know. Secret doors to secret bases. A tiny latch of switch hidden somewhere in a roadside derelict, which opens up the door to Bay and Creek. But we don’t even need to find it. We just blow the whole place up, leave the entrance unusable. Not a devastating attack, of course, but hopefully annoying to Bay and Creek. Hopefully causing them a great deal of trouble.

Alice: But I can tell Keisha has had it. I can tell she no longer thinks this is enough, because it isn’t, is it? It’s not enough to just annoy them. We’re like mosquitos, she says. Mosquitos kill over a million people a year, I point out, but she snorts. “We’re not giving them malaria,” she says. “Well, maybe we should consider doing that,” I say. I laugh. She doesn’t.

Keisha: We don’t have malaria. What we have is information. We know about Bay and Creek, and we know about Thistle and the US government. We need to get that information out of us and into the world. All of those journalists wondering what the Derelict Bombers are about. The message wasn’t for them, but maybe it should be.

I start making calls, cold-calling the folks I see on important looking bylines, from phone booths on our lunch stops and fuel breaks. Mostly I get hung up on. But this woman, (- Levitz) [0:15:42] Los Angeles Times. She tells me, “I’ll need proof. And I say, “I can give you that.”

Alice: Causality is a tricky thing. Cigarettes don’t cause cancer. People don’t cause cancer. It is the intersection of the two which makes cancer happen.

Keisha: This next part I didn’t see. I didn’t know about it until alter, and even then I can only extrapolate. I don’t have any participants who would be interested in talking to me, and if there were any witnesses they wouldn’t have survived the witnessing.

In a field somewhere, let’s say Nebraska, only it’s not Nebraska but it’s similar to Nebraska. A man walks out along the grass. There’s something wrong with how he’s walking. He has a limp maybe? Except it’s not regular enough to be a limp. His walk is wobbly and wet, like he’s shifting himself along on piles of mud. As he gets closer, there is the huff and snort of his breath. His skin hangs loose on his face. His eyes are yellow around the pupils. His teeth are yellow, too. His polo shirt says “Thistle”. He is greeted by a group of men just like him. Boogeymen out of nightmares. There are hundreds of them in this remote field. They were scattered out into the highways when their town near Victorville had been discovered. But they have slowly made their way to this place, picking off innocent people as they went.

Traces of blood leading to a point on a map. And here at this point, they gather.

A final person joins the group. She does not look like the rest of them. She wears a Bay and Creek uniform. Her name is Lucy. Once I thought she had rescued me from the Thistletown. Once I followed her to the Salton Sea. Once she let me walk away from a Bay and Creek base, let me think it was an act of mercy. Now she looks over this group of serial killing monsters, and she smiles and says, “OK. Let’s get to work.”

I became a truck driver because, well, that-that’s a long one. I thought my wife alice was dead. But she isn’t dead. And she’s out there somewhere on the highways and back roads, and I’m trying to find her. Just driving my truck around and around looking for her. That’s who I am really. I am the one that looks for Alice. And Alice is the one who isn’t dead, but isn’t here.

I was in Los Angeles. All downtowns are the same downtown, they are landscapes built for the facilitation of money and business without thought to he human experience. And we are tiny to these monuments and that we are allowed to pass among them is a privilege, not a right. Still each downtown bears some mark of its city. The LA downtown, despite surface similarities, could not be mistaken for New York or Chicago, it’s too eclectic. It’s too strange in its architecture. LA is, is much more than movies but – movies infuse everything because movies are the only history the city will acknowledge. The history of the indigenous people, the history of the Latino people, these are set aside. The city looked at all the people that had already come and thought, ah! A blank slate! And so they did not draw from the Gabrielino or the Chumash or even the Spanish in their missions, they drew from the movies. From the foundational idea that LA could and should be anywhere in the world. So the style of LA is every style, each house and each neighborhood built in wildly different ways. It’s art deco and Spanish stucco and mid-century modern.

In Brand Park, out in Glendale, there’s this enormous house turned public library that is less actual Middle Eastern and more movie Middle Eastern, built by the wealthy white man whose garden that park once was. There’s nowhere in LA that feels stylistically of one piece, and it is that incoherence that provides the coherence of the city.

You see, I’ve come to town on your word, Alice. Only it wasn’t your word direct of course just – whispers through a network of safe houses and gatekeepers, those living on the fringe of society who can be trusted with the kinds of messages we send back and forth. But who knows how the messages mutate mouth to mouth? But still, even through this mutilation of intent, I can hear your voice, like a heartbeat, your skin and bone.

It’s Tanya in Omaha, a friend of the cause, who reaches out to me on my radio to finally lay your words to rest. There’s a meeting in Los Angeles, you’ve heard. You don’t know the exact nature and purpose of this meeting, no one seems to, but the word is that it’s a meeting of those at the heart of it, the ones that are making the real choices, that shape every decision that we think we freely make. So I’ve come to town to find that meeting. I will find this meeting and then… shit, I don’t know. And then I will decide what to do next.

I’m faced with a mystery that’s so much bigger than myself that it sits like an uneven weight in my chest. I feel off balance, so I take comfort in smaller mysteries, ones that don’t matter at all. In Pico-Robertson, a five minute walk from six different synagogues, and a celebrity chef kosher Mexican restaurant called Mexikosher, is a strange synagogue with no windows. The architecture is unmistakable. Modern LA Jewish has a certain look and this place has it, right down to the arches designed to look like the two tablets of the Commandments. Except this synagogue is several stories tall, and with no visible entrance.

What does it mean to blend in? What-what does it mean to, to disguise, what does it mean to stick out? These are intrinsically Jewish questions. A people that has, throughout over a thousand years of oppression, variously done all three. And this way too the building is very Jewish. Of course it is not a synagogue. It is, in fact, 40 oil wells hidden inside a soundproofed structure designed to look like a synagogue. And it is not the only one, just five minutes down the road is an office building with no doors and no windows, that one is 50 wells.

The machinery of our system is not hidden below us, it is disguised among us. Rocks that are actually utility boxes, trees that are cell towers. That vacant house that we walk by day after day, the one with the opaque windows? Actually a maintenance entrance for the metro.

Which buildings are real and which ones are disguises? It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But that’s what makes me enjoy considering it.

Sylvia’s here too. She’s really come a long way from the teenage runaway I first discovered on the side of a highway. Did you tell her about the secret meeting, Alice? She is both more vulnerable and far braver than either of us, did you send her to this place? [sighs] We reunited on one of the vacant cul-de-sacs near LAX, where neighborhoods that had once been an airport’s buffer zone were now demolished.

“Heya,” Sylvia said, as though we were meeting at the continental breakfast at a hotel, not on a dark empty street after months of not seeing each other. “Hey yourself,” I said. “Why did you come?” She shrugged, performed nonchalance. “Same reason as you, I guess.”

Well then I guess neither of us knew. Because I had no idea why I was there, I didn’t even knew who was meeting in this town, let’s start with that. OK what what organization, what secret brotherhood, what ancient cabal that influences world events is now sitting around the table in some sterile backroom in this sunny, thirsty city?

I could have asked Sylvia what she knew about it, but I didn’t. I felt like I would be following a script you gave to me, Alice, and I am not interested in your dictating my actions. So instead I asked her: “How you been?” And she took a long slow breath that was more answer than words could ever be. “[sighs] I’ve been good,” she said. “You know, trying my best, finding places to sleep, finding a friendly face on the other side of a meal.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s the same struggle for everyone. But those of us who live on the road, everything is amplified, you know?” I do know. Goddammit, I know.

I wasn’t even sure where in the region this meeting might be held. So I drove out east to the desert where the mountains looked like set backdrops, unreal and perfect, taking up half the sky. Palm Springs, the town killed by cheap plane tickets. Why drive two hours from the city for the weekend, when it’s possible to weekend in Honolulu or Costa Rica instead? Then, having died, Palm Springs hung on just long enough for everything dated about it to become vintage cool. Now it’s back, a mid-century modern paradise of steel beams and rock walls and that style of beautiful, but featureless wooden security fence that only exists in Southern California. Old motels not updated since the heyday of the 50’s now are converted to hip resorts with (farmed) table food and upscale tiki bars. The city is an Instagram feed. Which is both snark and compliment, because it is a genuinely beautiful place.

I wondered the town, feeling that there was something worth finding there, but unsure where it would be hidden. I visited Elvis’ Honeymoon Hideaway, a garish airplane of a house with giant wings of a roof looming at the end of a cul-de-sac, providing kitsch to the dwindling population of Elvis enthusiasts.

That house was built on sale for 9 million a few years back and is now reduced to an easy 4, so make those owners an offer and you too could own a house that is listed as a historical site. A place where Elvis had sex a few times. It probably doesn’t have a dishwasher, though, so… Just south of Cathedral City, I saw a sign that looked familiar. It’s this huge neon pink elephant, mouth wide in mid-laugh, splashing herself. A pink elephant carwash. The sign has a twin sister in Seattle, that one is famous. It was weird running into her in the desert too. It was like driving through the suburbs and suddenly finding out that 150 years ago, they also built an Eiffel tower in Pomona.

I stopped the car and I just gawked up at her. It made me so happy. And then, looking down from the sign, the horror came to me. I saw someone walking towards me with a shuffle that I recognized. Like their legs had no muscle or bone but were heavy sacks of meat attached to their body. One dead leg thrust forward after another, and as the man came close, he looked up and I went from dread suspicion to horrible certainty.

He’s one of those creatures that I call Thistle men. Sagging human faces hung limply on skulls that are the wrong shape. Yellow teeth, yellow eyes. They are serial murderers hunting the back roads of our highway systems, and one of them was here.

He made eye contact with me. He laughed, a sound like hanging knives clattering together. And then he was gone. The neon elephant’s face no longer seemed friendly. I mean it, too, seemed to be laughing.

Sylvia and I, we split up for the day. We just watched the traffic and people, looking for suspicious crowds, folks that don’t fit in with the tourists and the beautiful people working as baristas just for now. Of course we don’t know what those suspicious crowds would even look like. Grey men in grey suits going greyly about the tedious business of running the world? Or, like the Thistle men, monsters of hideous aspect?

I reached out to my friend Lynn who works as a dispatcher at my trucking company. She and I became friends soon after I started. She doesn’t take shit, I don’t give shit, we get along that way. “Any unusual moments in Los Angeles?” I said. “Strange shipments, unsual routings, anything?” “You know I can’t tell you that,” she said. “What if I said please?” I said. She snorted into the phone. [chuckles] “In that case, sure,” she said. “I always like you when I’m polite, let me see what I can find.”

Sylvia and I saw nothing of note that day. We ate together at a Korean barbeque place built into the dome of what had once been a restaurant shaped like a hat. “This is nice,” she said towards the end of the dinner. It was, it really was.

You know, a city is defined by its people but it’s haunted by its ruins. There are no cities without vacant lots, the skeletons of buildings, ample evidence of disaster and failure. Our eyes slide past them because they tell a different story about our city than the one we wanna hear. A story in which all of this could slip away in a moment. Even though we know this fact is true, even more for Los Angeles than most cities. This city will some day be shaken to the ground, or burned, or covered over with mud, or drowned by the rising sea or strangled by draught. The question is, as it is for each of us in our personal lives, not if it will die but how.

I like to go and look at these broken places where the refuse of recent history shows. It allows me to look at a region differently, maybe see what I was missing. And if a secret meeting was gonna be hidden here, where but in the cracks? So I peer in. I search.

Above the Pacific Coast highway in the hills of Malibu that are so beautiful when they aren’t falling or burning, is what remains of a house. That house was a mansion built in the 50’s and burned in the 80’s when its location finally caught up to it. There’s now a popular hike that goes right into the ruins, so any walker can go see this place where people lived as recently as 30 years ago. A ruin shouldn’t be so new. A Roman home destroyed by a volcano, well OK you know. A medieval castle, sure. Even an old stone settler’s hut, 100 years old, alright, OK that make sense. But a house that once held a television and a shower? It feels wrong to walk on the foundation, stepping over the bases of walls and around the chimney. It was a home not so long ago, and now it is transformed. Transformation is uncomfortable, and easily mistaken for an ending.

In Griffith Park, I met with Sylvia in the old zoo. All the animal enclosures are still there, and you can sit in them and look at where once caged animals lived, and now wild animals are free to come and go.

Sylvia and I sat in the artificial caves, trying to imagine what the purpose of this secret meeting was. Sure, generally the word was out that it was a meeting of those in control in order to further control us, but specifics were, as they often are, lacking. Sylvia asked me: “Do you feel like this story is too convenient?” And I had no way to respond but nodding. “But we still have to look for it, right?” she said. And I nodded again.

As the sun moved behind the hills, it got very cold. She said, “Yeah”. And I said, “Yeah.” And neither one of us meant it.

Gentrification comes for us all. Let’s leave aside for a moment the many issues of endangered communities and rocketing prices, and consider just two cases of what people will look past to get access to LA property. December 6, 1959, in the hills just below Griffith Park, a doctor lived with his wife in a mansion with an incredible view. The Christmas tree was up for the season, wrapped gifts underneath. At 4:30 in the morning, the doctor got out of bed, retrieved a ball-peen hammer and murdered his wife with it. Then he attacked his daughter, though she survived. And then he took a handful of pills and was dead by the time police arrived.

That house stood empty ever since, still filled with the family’s things: the furniture, the tree, wrapped gifts underneath. A prime house in a prime LA area, but who would live in a house where such horror had happened? For 60 years, no one. Well, the house sold for 2.2 million last year. A view of the city, just above those (-) [0:21:06]. Well at this point, who wouldn’t take some hauntings and a terrible bloody past for that?

Meanwhile the Cecil Hotel in Hollywood, site of an inordinate number of murders and suicides, where the Night Stalker lived in the 80’s while causing terror across the region, where just a few years back, a body floated in the water tank for days before being discovered, is now the boutique Stay on Main. A rebranding for this rebranded city. Even our murders are getting gentrified.

Maybe it’s me. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t like change. Change is often wonderful. But we should definitely think hard about what we are changing into, and what that change might mean. We should just spend a little time thinking about that.

[long break]

Still searching for this meeting. I went up the coast, over the Grade and down toward Axnard, not as cool as Ventura or as rich as Camarillo. Oxnard gets by. As I waited to hear from Lynn, I walked on Silver Strand, just watching the surfers. Many, even now in the winter. Nothing will keep them out of those frigid Alaskan currents. I headed south to Channel Island harbor. It was absolutely peaceful on its shore. The ocean is chattering and restless, the harbor sleeps. It does not stir except to send crumbling waves in the wake of the few boats in and out.

During my walk, I saw a rowboat. Old, practically falling apart. Something about the occupants of the rowboat made me look closer. Stooped figures in awkward postures that looked painful. One of them turned to face me, though the boat was 60 feet offshore, and even at that distance, I could see. Two Thistle men, floating in a rowboat in the (Sound).

“Ooooooooooooooooo,” one of them shouted at me in a gentle high-pitched voice. “Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.” There was something that looked a lot like a human arm poking out over the rim of the rowboat.

I returned to my truck. Not everything is my problem.

Worship is a feeling so all-encompassing that it can be easy to misunderstand from outside. Take the worship of Santa Muerte, a Mexican (folk) saint of death, likely a legacy of pre-Colombian devotion, dressed in the clothes of the colonizing religion. The church has spent a long time trying to suppress her worship, but of course the church has never been good at actually suppressing much, and devotion to Santa Muerte has only spread in recent times.

Like many figures of death, she represents healing and well-being. Religion often lies in embracing contradiction. Those on the outside, they see this as a weakness but those on the inside recognize it as strength. The temple of Santa Muerte in Los Angeles is just down on Melrose Avenue, sharing a building, as everything in LA does now, with a weed store. It is a one-room shrine established by a husband and wife, full of life-sized skeletons bearing (-) [0:25:04]. It would be easy as an outsider to default to one’s own associations with skeletons and come to one’s own emotional conclusions, but it is healthier to embrace the contradiction of these symbols of death. That, after all, physically hold us up for as long as we live. To deny Santa Muerte is to deny our own bodies.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater carries a different kind of worship: devotion to a performance style that time has left behind. And the outside of the building is – let’s face it, it’s creepy. Because, like skeletons, puppets have taken on a certain cultural connotation in the wider world. But we should try to see it from the inside, as the earnest expression of performance and joy.

Mm mm. No I can’t. Mm mm, I ju- not with puppets. Skeletons, fine. Loose-skinned monsters from whatever world, well I’ve deal with them, but puppets? Mm mm.

Lynn got back to me. “You didn’t hear this from me,” she said. “That goes without saying,” I said. “No it doesn’t,” she responded, “because I just told you that. Now, there have been some shipments that don’t belong to any company. Or the company info is missing from them, I can’t understand what I’m looking that. They certainly don’t hold up to any scrutiny at all, so I don’t think that they were expecting scrutiny. These things stand out so bad that they might as well be big red arrows pointing at a location in Los Angeles.”

It was late afternoon. Sylvia was asleep in the back of the truck’s cab. I lowered my voice. “Where?” She told me. I looked at Sylvia, knowing she would want me to wake her up, to take her with me. But I didn’t. I let her sleep. I went alone. Better that one of us survive.

I went where Lynn told me: up La Cienega, past a mall and a hospital. I came to the address she gave me. An unassuming place. If it weren’t for the brightly lit shine, I might not have even spotted it from the street. I went through the gates. There was a courtyard there, deserted. The air was still and there was no sound, but the stillness felt temporary, like the pause after an act of violence before anyone can get over their shock and react. I continued through the doors to a dark room. Not the grand hall I might have expected for a meeting like this, but a cozy place. Rows of theater seats. A stage draped in red curtains, from which a speaker stood addressing the crowd. There was music. Was that music? Or was it the shifting and squirming of inhuman bodies? Because there was something inhuman in this place, I could feel it. Not the people in the seats, they seemed completely human. Looking up at the person speaking, following the narrative, and slowly having information dawn on them.

In fact, the people in the seats did not at all seem like the kind of people I would expect at a meeting like this. Were these the powerful, the wicked? Were these the unseen hands ushering us to disaster? Looks can be deceiving. Everything can be deceiving, up to and including the truth, but no. I did not think that these were monsters, I thought they were people like me. People lured to the spot for the same reason I had been, because the story of the meeting had been a very good story. It played exactly into how I had thought the world works. It fed my suspicions and it led me to this place. And I think the same is true for every person in that room. They were there, like I was there, looking for a good story. But why were they led there? Hmm? If the meeting itself was a decoy, then what was the true purpose of this moment?

And that’s when I saw them. Lingering in the shadows at the edges of the crowd. Men with faces that sagged. Flesh that peeled. Yellow teeth, yellow eyes. Thistle men ringed the crowd. (Wools to sheep, parks to bunnies). Hunters. Prey. Did the people in their seats notice? Did they look into the shadows and see the inhuman eyes peering back at them, did they smell the breath of the Thistle men, like mildew, like soil? A smell of rot from deep within, cold lungs, did they hear the occasional laugh coming from a gurgling broken throat? Did they look beside them at seats that were empty and think, wasn’t someone here just moments ago? Or was there? But surely there wasn’t, because where could they have gone? And then the shadows at the edges of the crowd, the people that had once sat in those seats, were led into a place from which they could never return.

I understood. A simple plan: tell an irresistible story. A story that is exactly what all of us fighting Thistle might want to hear. That we were right all along. That the world really is against us in so simple and easy a way that the culprits could all meet in one room. And we would come to hear that story, and then Thistle would take us. Why hunt when instead they could lure?

Standing in the door to that hall of horrors, I saw the faces of the Thistle men as they turned and noticed. One gave a yelp and started to lope towards me and I fled. Where the courtyard had been empty, it was now packed shoulder to shoulder full of men with loose faces and eyes that went yellow at the edges and wet lips hiding sharp teeth. They were waiting for the crowd inside. Hungry creatures preparing to feed on any person that stepped out of that theater. I pushed into and past them, using their momentary surprise to escape, and I ran until my throat was dry and ragged, through that courtyard and out to where the lights of the strip club across the way flashed back and forth, back and forth, and then into my car and then onto the maze of freeways where it is so easy to disappear.

I kept my eye glued on the mirrors, but no one was chasing me. Somewhere behind me, an audience of innocents remained in Thistle’s trap, and I wouldn’t help them. I couldn’t.

Instead, I went back to the truck. Sylvia was still asleep in the cot. I sat in the driver’s seat. I was exhausted. The sun had fully set, and I allowed my eyelids to drift downwards. “Hi,” said Sylvia. She was in the passenger’s seat turned sideways towards me. It was light again. I don’t know how long I’d slept, I know I didn’t dream. There are small mercies in life, I guess. “Did you find out anything?” Sylvia said. I looked in her eyes. She’s so young. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair that she was out here like me on this labyrinth of roads and rest stops. But that’s just what it was. For her and for me and for so many others.

And she looked at me with trust. And I looked right back and I said, “I didn’t find anything. I don’t think the meeting is even real. Let’s get out of here.” Sylvia yawned, she stretched, she nodded. “Yeah OK,” she said. “Might as well. Too bad this turned out to be nothin’.” “Too bad,” I said.

So now here I am telling the story from just outside of Ashland, Oregon. Los Angeles is hundreds of miles behind me now. It isn’t far enough.

I love you, Alice. I stayed alive another day. You do the same, OK? OK.

[applause]

Joseph Fink: Thank you to everyone who came out for our Largo show. We will be back in two weeks with chapter 1 of our third and final season. This show would not be possible without our Patreon supporters. Such as the incredible Ethel Morgan, the indomitable Lilith Newman, the victorious Chris Jensen, and the electrifying Melissa (Lumm).

If you would like to join these folks in helping us make this show, please check out patreon.com/aliceisntdead, where you can get rewards like director’s commentary on every episode, live video streams with the cast and crew, bonus episodes, and more.