Interfictions 2 (11 page)

Authors: Delia Sherman

"Aren't you cold?” I asked, when I saw his short-sleeved T-shirt. He smiled and shook his head. The cold obviously didn't bother him. That's when I knew he was a ghost: it was at least twenty degrees that morning.

All these questions bubbled inside of me, but I was so nervous I didn't know if I could get them out. “Do you think we'll be able to stop this escalation with China?” I finally asked.

He looked very sad. Just then, a friend tapped me on my shoulder. I glanced away for just a second, but when I turned back, he was gone.

Would it surprise you to learn that I attended that sit-in on March 15? And, yes, India sent the first cruise missiles into Nanjing two days later.

* * * *

Warp & Weft Message Boards

Topic:
Jake Pray was MURDERED and gov't is COVERING it up!

Username:
FightAllPwr4

Date:
April 2, 2017â3:34 EST

RoseGranny is a government dupe. She says “there were no signs of violence,” but how can we trust the coroner's report when it was commissioned by the same government that first marked Pray for assassination?! That's like trusting the tobacco industry to give an accurate autopsy to the Marlboro man! Billy Davis, who was THERE, said the arresting officer called him a “fucking raghead” and “commie” and that he was a “mass murderer” who “flew the planes into the Twin Towers.” This jerk couldn't wait to get his hands on Jake. Just consider a few things:

Why is the coroner report dated APRIL 1?! A subtle hint, maybe, that all is not what it seems? APRIL 1, 2007, was a SUNDAY. Who publishes a coroner report on a SUNDAY? This is a fucking ten-year-old April Fools' joke, people!

He had a “spontaneous cardiac artery dissection” but he only had a 25-micron tear? How was that enough to kill him? Do you know how big 25 microns is? Half the width of a STRAND OF HAIR!

Where did this famous rope come from? Violet Omura, a respected physicist, was his lover at the time. She visited him a few hours before he was discovered dead. She says he seemed distressed by the racist cop's treatment but showed no signs of chest pain or anything that could lead to his “spontaneous” death! Significantly,
she saw no rope anywhere in the cell!
Where did it come from? The forgotten remains of a top-secret government “alternative interrogation” technique, imported from our gulags in Guantanamo, Stare Kjekuty, and Iraq?

Jake Pray was tortured to death by our own government. Maybe the reason he's haunting us, RoseGranny, is because he wants the truth to come out!

JakePrayTruth.org

* * * *

Warp & Weft Message Boards

Topic:
Re: Jake Pray was MURDERED and gov't is COVERING it up!

Username:
SweetGreenOnions

Date:
April 2, 2017â3:45 EST

omura did it. evidence from “not a factor,” the last song he ever wrote:

The invisible hand blasts the cradle

Spreading peace by throwing bombs

We feast beneath the master's table

Sating growls with salvaged crumbs

Save the world? It's just a song she told jake to provoke a fight with those officers. the NSA i]paid[/i] her to be the yoko ono of the antiwar left.

Excerpt from
Real Ghosts: The Warp & Weft Guide to Specters and Revenants of the 21st Century
by Dede Star Flower

(New York: HarperPenguin, 2018)

The accuracy of his revenant predictions is quite remarkable. Two days after the New York Medical Examiner saw Pray's ghost in her office building, the Iranians kidnapped fifteen UK soldiers. In 2009, a cocktail waitress sighted Pray in an alley, and that very night the United States dropped the first round of tactical nuclear weapons on Iran. In 2011, Amina Okrafour was marking the anniversary of John Lennon's death in Central Park when she saw Pray's ghost. The next day the Chinese government shipped one thousand support troops to the Iranian front. The list goes on: thirteen activists see Pray at an antiglobalization rally in Sweden; the next day India tests a nuclear bomb and the cease-fire ends in Kashmir. When San Francisco representative Linda Xiaobo reported seeing Pray during a ceremony in the Mojave desert, we all knew that the talks to bring India into NATO were a certainty. Sure enough, a few days later, the United States honored its obligations under the treaty and declared itself officially at war with China and Pakistan.

As a revenant, Jake cannot stop these horrors from occurring, but he can stand witness to them. He can accuse us, like Hamlet's father, of not doing enough.

* * * *

Written Communication from Zacharias Tibbs, Topeka, Kansas

To:
Violet Omura, NYU, Department of Applied Physics

Date:
November 18, 2020â10:44 pm, EST

[
Sender:
Verified]

Professor Omura:

Perhaps you have wondered why I have not yet responded to your Communication which you sent to me this past April. In fact it is because I have UNDERTAKEN to follow your kind & SAGE ADVICE and read those very ERUDITE & SCHOLARLY works by the great Einstein, Feynman, & Chatterjee. I found the latter's work on M-THEORY and the QUANTUM GRAVITY SYNTHESIS most Fascinating, though I must confess that I found a great deal of it Difficult, and indeed, sometimes quite IMPOSSIBLE to understand. GOD, it is clear, has GIFTED her with a great mind. As did HE to YOU.

It's strange, I thought upon my completion of these works, how very CLEAR my errors in the past are to me now. Though I maintain my belief in REVENANTS & the HOLY SPIRIT, it is clear that my EQUATIONS & THEORIES, which I had thought could explain the WORLD, were not worth a Greasy Rag. I see the DEPTH of THOUGHT of those PHYSICISTS exploring the universe, and I feel a small INCHWORM in comparison. I must thank you for your most UNUSUAL & FAITHFUL correspondence over the years. Without it I fear I would never have understood my Gross Errors.

I have also Considered your Strange words to me regarding your SAD & PAINFUL feelings of guilt & regret over some mysterious Life Event. I say to you that your grief GRIEVES ME, for I know that you, too, could find solace in the LORD, if only you would open your heart to HIM. You say you Cannot, because “a scientist does not work from faith, but evidence.” This is a Worthy Philosophy, but I say that because I KNOW GOD EXISTS, the EVIDENCE for him will someday be FOUND. Cannot you SEE His HAND in Chatterjee's Equations?

Can you not SEE that the reason your friend Jake still WALKS AMONG US is because he is a Revenant on Earth?

I await your Response with great Eagerness & Anticipation.

Zach Tibbs

* * * *

Excerpt from “Changing the Score: My Life with Jake Pray"

Vanity Fair
, May 2025

by Violet Omura

Before I say anything else, before I tell my story, or what little I'm privileged to know of Jake's, let me make this perfectly clear:

I loved Jake Pray. For a certain period of time he, and the anti-war movement, were my entire life. When he died, that life fell apart so completely that for the first and only time I considered suicide. In some ways, on some nights, that pain has never left me. I could never have harmed Jake. Those who suggest otherwise reveal a lack of understanding about our relationship so profound I can only pity them. To those whose critical faculties have not been addled by baseless conspiracy-mongering, I offer my story.

I first saw him at the West End, in December 2003. I was a senior at Columbia, a physics major so obsessed with quantum mechanical particle interactions and Feynman diagrams that I had only dimly registered our country's illegal invasion of a sovereign state. (Such ignorance was possible, then; over a certain income level, foreign wars didn't touch your daily life.) I gleaned my news from articles my sister sent me, or my suitemates' overheard conversations. I felt the appropriate outrage and promptly forgot about it. What, after all, does outrage look like at the Planck scale?

Later, while drunk, I would amend that rhetorical question: what does it
sound
like? The bar was packed that night. Some were the typical Friday-night crowd of loud freshmen and bored frat brothers, but others had heard Jake at the big rally in February and were excited to see him again. He didn't even perform “What We Sing,” the song that was already turning into an anthem. It didn't matter. Jake had a voice that stuck you to your chair and forced you to listen. Almost gentle, with an ironic bite. “Like fresh ginger,” a simile-inclined local reviewer once called it (and Jake and I laughed until we had to stop to breathe; we ate in Chinatown that night, and he bought me ginger beer). His falsetto was eerie; his bass rough. Sometimes his vibrato wavered so wildly you thought he might lose the note, but he never did. His lyrics were passionate and only sometimes political. He had thick, wavy brown hair; a high forehead; wide eyes with camel's lashes; and a chin that dimpled when he smiled. He was young, talented, and beautiful. I was twenty-two, and I felt as though I'd just crawled from Plato's cave.

I introduced myself after the set. He bought me a drink. We talked, I don't remember about what. For all I know I babbled about brane theory and quantum gravity all night. I had never been very good at talking to people. But he didn't seem to mind me. He told me a little about himself. He had graduated from NYU that year as a film major, but he didn't want to make movies. And the usual: he was appalled by the Iraq War, President Bush, our foreign policies. He quoted Chomsky, which was familiar, and Said, which surprised me. He said he had met Edward Said as a child, when his parents had first moved to the States from Palestine. I asked him if he was Muslim; he said he was a “closet atheist.” He asked me if I was religious; I said I was a physicist.

He took me back to my dorm that night; my philosophy of alcohol consumption at the time did not include moderation. He kissed me as he pressed the call button for the elevator, as though I might not notice if he were doing something else.

"Do I get your number?” he asked.

What odd syntax, I thought, many years later. Like it was a game show and my number was the all-expense-paid trip to the Bahamas.

My good friend Billy Davis, who died last year, spent his life advocating for a full inquiry into Jake's death. I find it ironic that even now, in the midst of our global war with China and Iran, the relatively insignificant Iraq War has so much cultural relevance. Perhaps because it is the first moment when our generation, collectively, began to realize that something had gone terribly wrong in our political and social system. Jake's death symbolized too much of that moment for us to ever let it go.

They took us to Pier 57, that detention-center-turned-toxic-waste-dump where they liked to herd activists during overcrowded demonstrations. Jake was furious that day, on a manic high. He was no stranger to racismâwas any Arab living in New York City after 9-11?âbut the arresting officer that day reveled in a particularly nasty brand of invective. “Raghead” was the least of it (and if Jimmy Sullivan can even tell the difference between his mouth and his lower orifice, I've yet to see the evidence). After they arrested us, Jake could hardly sit still. The floor was covered in an unidentifiable sludge that slid beneath our shoes and smelled like decomposing tires. We were all chilly and desperate to get out. Jake went to ask the officers when they would release us. I never heard what they said to him, and I never got to ask. Jake started yelling and shouting. His hands trembled as he gesticulated, like a junkie coming off a high, though I knew that he hadn't had more than half a joint. I remember being terrified, afraid that they would shoot him. When they set off the taser, he dropped to the floor like a marionette loosed of its strings. He groaned, but he couldn't even seem to speak. The police officers laughed, I remember.

What did he yell? “Pigs,” certainly. But Jake hated few things more than he hated the ongoing Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and he would have
never
used the despicable anti-Semitic tripe certain opportunistic faux-rock musicians attribute to him. We had been unlawfully detained and verbally abused. Did Jake's behavior represent a failure to turn the other cheek? Of course. But he never meant to be a martyr.

I went to the Tombs late that night, after they released us from the Pier and arrested him. His lawyer said the police insisted on detaining him for questioning and were charging him with “disorderly conduct.” Jake was happy to see me. The police had confiscated his guitar, and one of the officers conducting the interrogation was a real (to put it more genteelly than Jake) ignorant racist. I asked Jake if he was okay. He said he was, but he couldn't wait to get out of there. There was no rope in the cell that I can recall.

He was acting a little more restless than normal. Tapping his fingers against the bars and rocking back on his heels like a drinker with the DTs. It didn't seem remarkable at the time, and it might be that I am merely creating false positives, searching for a clue where none exists.

He held my hand before I left and kissed my palm. He liked romantic gestures.

"There's something happening here,” he sang softly. Buffalo Springfield.

I kissed him. “I'll get Neil Young and the gang down here tomorrow."

"I'll see you, Angel."

It was the last thing he ever said to me.

But he had never called me “Angel” before.

* * * *

Written Communication from Violet Omura, NYU, Department of Applied Physics

To:
Zacharias Tibbs; Topeka, Kansas

Date:
December 25, 2025â1:05 am, EST

[
Sender:
Verified]

I woke up twenty minutes ago and couldn't fall asleep. Chatterjee has posted a new paper on the public archives. Did you see it?