Bjarne Melgaard

Theresa had felt certain earlier in the day that it was starting again: She counted the paces in a trail of footsteps-shallow treaded cups frozen over in a crust of snow that led from the sidewalk to the rectory. She listened to a quiet scratching that issued from deep inside a sealed-over chimney; hangers scraped across racks in a room she knew to be empty. She saw the flash of a familiar red jacket skipping by the edges of her peripheral vision...  All familiar signs, signals, that had followed her and Jeremy for the past eighteen months on trips both west and east, home and away and back again. "They're back," she thought, the familiar indignation shot through with relief instead of regret. "They've come back for me..."

How strange it had felt when the stalking stopped, how lonesome and lost-all of the possibilities promised by the freedom of release suddenly rattling inside of her like coins dropped down a long, empty staircase. "Now I am really nothing," she thought. "Now I am gone for sure." She would sometimes ask, "Where am I?" recognizing that people had stopped moving closer to her, but not seeing that they had also been moving farther and farther away for a very long time.

It was too hard for her now, too impossible to locate herself without considering the way that her actions were framed by the windshields of idling cars that seemed to constantly wait for her, their Florida license plates somehow always referencing familiar combinations: a telephone number from her childhood, Jeremy's social security digits, a pin code, her birthday. "Happy fortieth, Theresa," a familiar-looking stranger driving one of these cars once had hissed at her. "You look good, baby." She watched him pulling away, watched her reflection roll across and then off the back window, saw that the plate read FLA10 26. Her birthday, her birthday, her awful fortieth birthday that had once seemed so benign in its distance, finally delivered to her by a stranger in a town car. "Fuck you, you Scientology whore," she'd screamed after him, shocked and thrilled by the confirmation-the sudden and intimate recognition. They'd known and remembered once, they'd searched and waited for her, watched her leave and followed her at a casual distance, made reports and logged times... a perfect circuit of recognition.

Of course it was all terribly frightening. It was scary to find strange notes on your car or your doorstep; disturbing to see your name written in the dust across the side of a windowless black van in an unfamiliar neighborhood; infuriating to feel the familiar defeat when the Church's interventions made things that had once felt solid suddenly feel flimsy, unreal-vaporized. The courses of surveillance and a series of expertly crafted and eerily discreet smear campaigns had followed Theresa and Jeremy relentlessly ever since they had refused to join the Church of Scientology. Suddenly people thought to be close friends or professional allies revealed the depths of their betrayals; neighbors and colleagues wordlessly brandished FBI files compiled on Theresa. There were doctored photographs and faked documents; a long-ago address book that had belonged to Theresa's mother showed up, without explanation, on a copy machine at a midtown FedEx office Theresa had never been to. A set of counterfeit receipts showing that Theresa had used her MasterCard to buy a 9-millimeter handgun in Pennsylvania was sent to the deacon at St. Mark's rectory. These documents, of course, were all listed in the legal complaint the couple was in the process of filing against the Church of Scientology for its campaign of harassment, along with its career-destroying character defamation that had poisoned Hollywood against them. "Names will be named," Theresa warned old friends whose loyalty had not been proven, "and don't think for a second that I won't do everything in my power to out all of you as the corrupt whores you are if I find out that you are involved in this fucking cult."

Theresa, of course, did everything she could to disable the Church's thugs from compiling information that could then be perverted to destroy her. She noticed immediately that the house phone in the rectory apartment on Ninth Street made a bizarre and mysterious clicking sound and began using a series of disposable mobile phones instead. The gas stove was shut off and replaced with an electric range; bank accounts were closed. "I know who you are," she would sneer at strangers on the street who walked too close or looked too long. "I know exactly who you fucking are, you cult cunt..." And her eyes would appear lit from within, incandescent and vibrating with the undefined sickness of insanity. She once clapped and laughed hysterically to see a young woman whom she'd confronted in a coffee shop turn red and crumble, humiliated and weeping after Theresa whispered something in her ear and spat into her cup. "You are so weak," she screamed as the woman fled, while another customer watched in horror to see Theresa's face change under the lights into something ill and evacuated.

The abuse became, as it usually does, the defining element of her life, and the constantly rotating and anonymous agents of that abuse collectively became the predictably brutal lover she had always secretly hoped for. They were all somehow happy, the economy of their mutual hatred transformed into a profoundly erotic relationship that defined each of them through its very degradation until one day, without warning, it all stopped.
One morning, the cars stopped coming. Theresa sensed that the tailings had ceased, that the mail was arriving untampered with, that her food had begun to taste conventional. The phone hang ups stopped, her e-mail displayed no signs of having been hacked, her things remained where she'd left them, untouched and unaltered. "What the fuck is going on, Jeremy?" she asked, panicked and rudderless. "Something big is coming." She braced herself, ready for a major assault that simply never arrived. "Something major is happening here..."

And so she waited. She listened and watched, eyes flashing and hair wild, her body tensed in anticipation for an assault that never came. One morning she heard a knock coming from the kitchen-a hollow, metallic knock that sounded normal enough to indicate that something was very wrong. She walked slowly toward the sound, toward the rhythmic tap-tap-tap that seemed to issue from the oven. She crept forward, a meat tenderizer clutched in her hand, waiting. "You are exhausting," she'd finally heard a voice whisper through the fan on her stove. "I just can't deal with you, Theresa, and to tell you the truth, it's not worth it anymore. You are nothing, Theresa Duncan. You have changed into a person who is nothing." And she watched as a previously unseen constellation of tiny LED lights embedded in her ceiling blinked out in unison. She heard a whir and a rush, then a strange silence, suddenly aware that an ambient electronic noise she hadn't noticed before had been abruptly disabled - and that she had been abandoned to the loneliness of her failure.

"Where did you go?" she would sometimes ask, of no one in particular. "What did I do wrong?" She knew that an answer would never come again. Her reflection started to look different-depleted and aged not by the harassment that had so plagued her but by the sudden cessation of that harassment, a theft that left her features as emblems of indifference and neglect. "Fuck you, you fucking mk ultra hooker," Theresa hissed at old friends with a hopefulness that left her feeling ashamed. A willing victim passed over, a body worthy of neither rape nor rejection.
"I'm giving you one last chance," she said in a voice loud enough to carry through her open window and into the street below. "This is your last chance!" Her nails began to push through the foil blister packs, the freed pills hitting the bottom of a small bowl that Theresa had once believed to be haunted. "I am taking these pills!" she cried out to a long-gone lover, to the abuser who had abandoned his charge. "I AM TAKING THESE PILLS," louder this time, and gurgling with the heat of the Jack Daniels. "I am..." And her voice finally trailed off into a piteous whisper, a cloying little girl's voice making threats that no longer mattered.

A final click echoed through the bedroom; it was the sound of a cassette tape spooling to its end and flipping-a primitive technology signaling that maybe someone was listening after all. She brought her hand up to her face, a kiss blown to an invisible observer. "Fuck you, cult whore," she whispered before closing her eyes, smiling and content, happy to know that someone still cared.

Alissa Bennett