A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  He just couldn’t be married to her anymore.

  She stayed for another month. The money from her waitressing job had gone to support him. She needed to save enough to leave. They agreed on terms of the separation. She would take the white 2004 Chrysler Sebring. He got to keep the dog, Arias, and the other car: a 1993 white Mazda pickup.

  The deal left him unhappy. The Sebring was an innocuous midsize sedan. Nobody would think twice seeing it parked on a residential street. But his beat-up old pickup? It had clocked more than 178,000 miles. Yellow chunks of stuffing poked out of the front seat. The right mirror was broken. Old scraps of wood filled the back. It was pretty creepy looking.

  “The truck is a little more conspicuous,” he thought.

  On April 16, 2010, Masha returned to Georgia in the Sebring.

  He was free.

  —

  He enrolled in Red Rocks Community College, a commuter school sitting on a low ridge above US Route 6 in Lakewood. Students walking from the sprawling parking lots that surrounded the low campus buildings heard a constant buzz from the four-lane freeway that carved through the town’s center. Inside the classrooms—all cinder-block walls and fluorescent lights—the noise was muted. Red Rocks made no pretension of being an elite school, but it had plenty to offer a military veteran with a high school degree. He considered himself a smart guy. But not educated. He told his professors that he had never read anything longer than a web page.

  He plunged into the school’s liberal arts curriculum, a freshman besotted by new horizons of knowledge. He took history, anthropology, philosophy—anything to explain the human psyche. He read Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas and Scottish skeptic David Hume, political theorist John Stuart Mill and German ethicist Immanuel Kant, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and American linguist Noam Chomsky. His notes filled hundreds of pages in Mead spiral notebooks that he kept scattered on his desk in the back room of 65 Harlan Street. He planned to major in psychology.

  He didn’t believe everything the professors at Red Rocks taught him. Some of it seemed woefully ignorant about the way the world really worked. But he loved discovering new things—about the universe, epistemology, himself. He impressed his teachers and his fellow students. A woman who worked with him on a project for psychology class said he was “very smart, probably the best student in the class.”

  School was an opportunity to redefine himself, he told his English 122 professor. He was struggling to write something grand. But he needed help:

  When I reflect upon my previous works, I can’t help but cringe a little bit when I realize how vapid and incoherent they were. I have been humbled by great writers as of late, and I can only hope that one day I’ll become half the wordsmith as the authors that I admire most.

  His Anthropology 101 class provided the opportunity to grapple with society and power. Everywhere, he saw faceless, powerful entities exercising dominion over the masses. In one exam, he railed against capitalism.

  We are taught through media, education systems, and virtually every institution that material “wealth” is important, and in many cases, “vital” to our survival. Because of all this, all of the systems, whether they be subsistence, social, economic, or political, revolve around the “almighty” dollar, for better or for worse.

  But it was Melinda Wilding, his professor for Introduction to Philosophy, who gave him a chance to understand the most mysterious thing in his life: the monster. He held a half-formed belief in the duality of man. Everybody, he thought, had two sides, one public, one private. The idea was a useful philosophy. It helped him comprehend—though not excuse—his own struggle. But Wilding opened him to the writings of a man far more steeped in the human psyche: Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Here was a man, the eager student thought, who understood the world.

  Jung introduced the modern world to the concept of archetypes—universal psychological structures that grew out of what he called the “collective unconscious,” shared by all humans. They were abstract ideas of people, situations, and concepts that resonated in the deepest recesses of the psyche. Myths, for instance, trafficked in archetypes: They told stories of the warrior, the trickster, the wise man. Jung dubbed one of the most important archetypes the “shadow”—a dark interior present in all people, though often hidden or denied by the conscious self. Jung believed that the path to self-actualization involved confronting the shadow: acknowledging its existence without embracing its sinister aims.

  Jung described the shadow—and the potentially catastrophic effects of ignoring it—in his 1938 classic, Psychology and Religion.

  Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness.

  Jung’s epistemology sang to him. That’s it, he thought. Repressed. Isolated. Liable to burst forth.

  He had a new project. He would learn everything he could about the monster.

  Wilding assigned the class a topic for a paper. What is a shadow in your life? He began his essay by explaining how he joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks despite his liberal politics. The military ignited his “warrior mentality,” he wrote. But when he discharged from service, he discovered a surprise.

  I realized that turning on the “warrior mentality” was much easier to do than turning it off. The “old me” would say that I’ve been brain-washed by the Army. However, the “new me” understands that I am just as much of a free thinker as I ever was; probably even more so. In many respects, I feel the “warrior mentality” has augmented my personality, my individuality and countless other aspects of my life. Nevertheless, I am beginning to discover that this “energy” does not always manifest itself in the most positive of ways.

  He didn’t really explain his shadow’s desires. The blackness of its umbra. The way it controlled him. Only that it kept him in the dark. “Like all personal shadows, it was extremely difficult to discern the negatives, and in some ways I was even fooled into believing that those negatives were actually positives for a very long time,” he wrote.

  He wanted Wilding to know: He had joined battle with his shadow. He hoped to win. But he couldn’t be sure of victory.

  Like Jung, I don’t believe that a person can fully extinguish their own shadows. Instead, it is best to take 100% responsibility for who we are, and to integrate our shadows into our conscious awareness. Obviously, this is a difficult process and it doesn’t happen overnight. But, it is a process that becomes much more obtainable once we learn to start questioning and rejecting the idea that our conscious thoughts and our egos are always in control and always right. Sometimes it’s necessary to question the authority within.

  Wilding chided him for not providing details about this personal shadow of his. “That is what this assignment called for, but I respect your right to decline,” she wrote. Underneath his final sentence about questioning “the authority within,” she scrawled “Why? When?” She wanted him to engage that question. She gave him 8.7 out of ten points.

  Wilding found her new student interested and eager. He was older than most of the others in his class. But he was intelligent and engaged, joining in conversations.

  Years later, when she discovered his past, she would wonder about the lessons she taught him. She found him “bright and insightful” in class. He was one of those students—not always common in community college philosophy classes—who “appeared to want to learn.” But had she been providing him insight into who he was? Or just an excuse wrapped in erudite modernist theory, a way to absolve himself of his actions?

  “My own personal ta
ke is that referencing a Jungian archetype is a way for him to transfer guilt,” she would say. “Or, the maneuver is a foil to point to his knowledge of the difference between right and wrong—all the while acting on the desire to prey on women and their fears as well as their bodies.”

  —

  Paying for school was easy. His service in the military entitled him to benefits under the GI Bill. Each semester, the Veterans Benefits Administration sent Red Rocks $3,834.35 for tuition and fees. Each month, the agency sent him an additional check for $1,531 for rent. The amount, based on a housing formula, was more than he was spending to lease 65 Harlan Street. So the United States government also paid for his gym, occasional meals at Hooters, and a subscription to the popular online video game World of Warcraft.

  When he needed more money, he turned to his shadow.

  For years, he had scoured the darkest corners of Internet pornography in search of relief. Porn about bondage and sadomasochism. Porn about rape. Porn about old women. Porn about teenage girls. Porn about dangerously malnourished women, their bones poking from their skin like they were famine victims. He chased the profane, the prurient, the obscene. His computer screen displayed images that were increasingly violent, and disconnected from reality. He masturbated constantly. The hunt for porn consumed him. He called it an “addiction.”

  His habit did nothing to sate the monster. But he figured out a way to make it pay. He began to build his own pornographic websites.

  At night, he would slip into the back room at 65 Harlan Street and get to work. He told his wife and friends that he was a web designer. But really, he spent his evenings trolling the Internet for new obscene images and videos. He would post them to his own websites, with links back to the website where the material originated. When somebody visiting his website clicked a link leading back to the original website, he would get a small commission. It was affiliate marketing, one of the Internet’s most basic business models. Each month, he got checks from a German company that served as middleman between him and the affiliate sites. The money was wired in euros to his bank account at the Elevations Credit Union in Boulder. Checks trickled in, $520.57 for one month, $355.78 for another.

  He started dreaming bigger. Across the top of a sheet of paper on his desk, he wrote “The Plan.” He aimed to boost revenue to $1,000 a month for one of his more popular sites, anilos.com, which featured older women. He hoped to get the flow from one affiliate network up to a constant $2,000 a month. His strategy: Build ever more niche porn sites, at a rate of one per week, to find additional revenue streams. By catering to more and more obscure deviances, he could make real money.

  On Myspace, he listed his occupation as “pornographer.” He amassed a collection of more than 1.7 million images and videos, some for personal use, some to post on websites. He stored them on the hard drive of his computer in the back room. He downloaded a free software program called TrueCrypt, which he used to encrypt the files with mathematically complex algorithms. The best hackers in the world—including those at the FBI and the National Security Agency—considered TrueCrypt’s technology nearly unbreakable. Years before, when he’d taken his aptitude test to get into the Army, he had qualified to study to become a cryptographer. Now he was one.

  He built dozens of websites designed to attract kindred shadows. His big moneymakers: skinnyteen.net, abusedteenwhores.com, grannypanties.net, hotteachersex.net. Other sites catered to rape. Still others to incest. The sites featured women in grotesque poses—gagged, humiliated. Older, gray-haired women, splayed on beds or engaged in sex with younger men. Others who looked dangerously young. One site, thinfetish.com, was designed to attract those sexually thrilled by emaciation.

  It was never enough. To keep the money flowing, he constantly had to find fresh images to add to his nest of websites. New material attracted new customers and kept old ones coming back. He told one friend that he was tired of “cheesy” porn.

  He wanted something more authentic. More real. As real as he could get.

  —

  A month after Masha left for Georgia, he plunged into modern romance—the Internet dating scene. Like always, he made sure to prepare. He lined a shelf in his back room with modern-day pickup guides. He was a student of Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists and Erik von Markovik’s The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed. Both books described the transformation of AFCs (average frustrated chumps) into irresistible PUAs (pickup artists), able to bed any SHB (super hot babe). They revealed secret societies where experienced Lotharios met to swap seduction techniques. There was the Tic Tac routine (give her a Tic Tac, describe yourself as an “Indian giver” who wants it back, and then kiss her); the Dryer Lint opening (enter a bar palming a piece of dryer lint, pretend to pick it off her shoulder, then ask, “How long has that been there?”); and the benefits of a glow-in-the-dark necklace (the better to “peacock” and attract attention to yourself).

  In the PUA universe, women are “targets.” The books contained scripts to help the PUA home in. Some focused on verbal takedowns called “negs.” One example:

  If your target interrupts you, say, “Hello, I’m talking, jeez,” or “Excuse me…may I finish my sentence first?” You then say to others in the group, “Is she always like that?” and roll your eyes playfully.

  Take the SHB down a notch, in other words, and it might confuse her enough to come on to you. It was practical psychology.

  To find women, he prowled online dating services like OkCupid. He browsed the “Casual Encounters” section of Denver’s Craigslist—an endless churn of dick pics, amateur porn, and raw cries for sex, mostly from men. When a woman posted an ad looking for a dinner date, he responded with jokes about his humdrum life.

  Was planning on staying in tonight and reading (I know, exciting), but I decided to peruse craigslist and saw your post and thought it might be fun to go have a couple of drinks.

  About me:

  32

  6'2" 220 lbs

  Divorced

  Well-read, well-traveled, confident, funny, and a good conversationalist

  Not expecting anything. Just wanting to go out for a bit.

  Don’t smoke, don’t do drugs.

  The poster was an amateur photographer. He told her that he would love camera lessons. “I have a Canon Rebel xTi, and I suck at using it haha! Maybe you can give me some pointers.” He closed with a smiley emoticon.

  Some women found him menacing. He told a twenty-eight-year-old Denver woman that he preferred girls who were petite, dressed in sexy clothes, and wore lots of makeup. “Every girl has a rape fantasy,” he told her. He scoffed when a thirty-one-year-old date told him that she liked a sadomasochism club in downtown Denver called The Sanctuary. The club would host sex parties where men and women could engage in S&M with boundaries. A “Dungeon Master” controlled the level of violence. Everyone was required to have a safe word, which would bring an immediate halt to an uncomfortable act. Bloodletting and scat play were forbidden. “These people here don’t know what domination is,” he told her.

  But he did—and it drove his search for women. “I’d feel them out,” he’d say. “I’d grab a girl by the back of the neck, by the hair. If they responded to that, then I knew.” A woman he could dominate. He made those dates dress up in high heels and garish lipstick. Sometimes, they begged him to fulfill their rape fantasies. He liked rough sex. “My thing was humiliation and basically degradation,” he’d say. But it was always consensual. “The girls I treated with respect. I never abused them—well, other than what they wanted.”

  These sadomasochistic encounters didn’t satisfy him, though. He had gotten to know the women. They were no longer targets. They were real people. “I could do all kinds of crazy stuff with a woman, a good-looking, attractive, intelligent woman that I liked a lot, but that was kind of the problem, too,” he’d say. “I liked them and I knew them. For whatever reason, that was a turnoff. I just didn’t get the
same thing out of it.”

  Then, while scanning OkCupid one day, he came across a woman named Amy. She was a thirty-three-year-old waitress at a swinger’s club in south-central Denver. Dark hair and straight bangs framed a round face with expressive, wide-set eyes. While waiting tables, she wore a schoolgirl outfit or a bikini. In her profile, she listed three adjectives to describe herself: “devious,” “curious,” and “twisted.”

  My kind of girl, he thought. He messaged her. “I have to know,” he said. “How are you twisted?”

  He picked her up at her place for the first date. They shot pool at a bar. She described him as a “perfect gentleman,” charming and witty. He left a glowing review of her on OkCupid: “Not only is she gorgeous, she is also a highly sophisticated woman with a mind that moves at warp speed.”

  “You are one of the few people in the world that I can relate to,” he wrote to her in one message.

  They did not date long. But they stayed in contact. She had trouble sleeping. He worked late maintaining his porn sites. They traded emails and messages throughout the night. He thought of Amy as a friend in the dark.

  She once told him about an incident at her apartment complex. While she was walking down a hallway, a man had jumped out and tried to grab her. She wrestled away. “The guy will come back eventually. He isn’t good enough yet. He will come back and succeed,” he told her. Under different circumstances, it might even be him. “The only thing that keeps me from being that guy that attacked you is my family and my life,” he said.

  He told her he was a sadist and that he wanted multiple sex partners. He boasted about his porn sites. He described fantasies about violent, degrading sex. He said that women were masochists who wanted men to hurt and control them. Some women, he told her, enjoyed being raped. “Some women like bruises all over from sex because they like sympathy from it,” he told her.