by Tom DeLonge
“Goddamn it,” she muttered. The wig looked fabulously outrageous, but she had a coffee stain on her sweater. She was already two minutes late for the interview and didn’t have time to rinse it out. She pulled the detachable fur collar off her scarlet coat and arranged it around her neck, trying to decide if it worked as some kind of quirky fashion statement. It looked like a pair of weasels were mating on her shoulders, but it covered the stain. “Oh, what the hell.”
She logged into her Skype account and waited for the call to come through, scanning her e-mail on a second computer for links to various news stories, one featuring blurry pictures of Bigfoot, another showing some suspiciously two-dimensional English fairies, and a brace of other idiotic stories too obviously faked to merit debunktion. That was what she called it. A ludicrous, bombastic and eye-catching word that had become her trademarked website title, something sure to come up in the imminent Huff Po interview.
The interview began well. The host, a perky but shrewd-looking blond woman named Nicole, lofted softball questions and Timika knocked them out of the park: “How long have you been running the site? What was the first case you wrote about? Tell us about some of the more elaborate hoaxes you’ve uncovered? Why do you think people are so quick to believe implausible things?”
Timika was calm and confident:
“Two and a half years.”
“The Essex crop circles, which turned out to be the work of two drunk teenaged boys using a tractor and some towable farm gear.”
“Well, there was the time the bankrupt owner of a Virginia lighthouse wanted to draw tourists by inventing a series of ghostly apparitions. I’m telling you, Nicole, this thing read like the script for a Scooby Doo episode. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for us meddling kids …”
It was only the last question, why people want to believe in things that obviously aren’t real, that gave her pause. Timika trotted out some familiar ideas about why people who live boring lives are drawn to mystery and conspiracy, and then Nicole, hinting at a bitterness she hadn’t shown thus far, asked how Timika felt about spending her life destroying other people’s harmless fantasies.
Timika paused for just a fraction of a second, adjusting to the unexpected jab, then answered. She said she felt fine about it, thank you, Nicole. She added that some of the things people believed in weren’t harmless at all, and some were quite possibly dangerous, and that even harmless delusions were manifestations of a larger culture that had reduced science and objectivity to a kind of he said/she said debate in which no one person’s authority or credibility was valued above anyone else’s. The opinion of an eminent physician, archaeologist or environmental scientist was worth no more than that of anyone with access to a twitter account, and sometimes the opinions of accomplished scientists carried less weight than those of people who were famous models or athletes or actors on a sitcom.
Nicole seemed satisfied with Timika’s answer. In hindsight, Timika felt the woman was attempting to goad her into saying more, because it made for better footage, not because she disagreed with her. Even so, she was rattled at the end, and when the interviewer wrapped things up with “And can I just say that I love your hair and that fur drape! So fun!” Timika wasn’t sure if she was being mocked.
Guess we’ll see when it goes live, she thought. Welcome to life in the spotlight.
Well, if it brought in some more revenue, it was worth it. She didn’t need the Huffington Post’s endorsement to know she was doing good, necessary work. She was glad they’d asked her, Why do you do this? It forced her to answer it for herself, something she hadn’t really done before.
She approached the day’s work with a new buoyancy that even Audrey’s whining about her sorry personal life and how the people at Fox News got paid more than she did could not dampen.
“What’s that thing around your neck?”
Marvin had finally shown up and was peering at her, leaning with one hand on her desk like he wasn’t sure of his balance.
Timika snatched the fur off and tossed it onto her jacket.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was covering a stain.”
“Right,” said Marvin, nodding with greater seriousness than the remark justified. “Got it.”
Timika wrinkled her nose. “You stoned, man? Because I told you about coming to work like that.”
“No, no,” said Marvin, dropping into a bizarre half crouch and putting his hands up in a half-assed surrender pose as he always did when he felt threatened. “Swear to God. It’s just, you know, passive.”
“Passive?”
“Yeah—my roommate had the bong going this morning, and I may have caught some of the collateral vibe, you know?”
Timika gave him a dubious frown. “You up to installing the new firewall?” she asked.
“Totally,” said Marvin. “Well within my powers. I’ll have it done before you can say ‘firewall.’” He paused, reflecting upon this. “But you might wanna not say it for, like, two hours.”
“Deal,” Timika said.
“Oh, and there’s a package for you,” he added, producing something about the size of a shoe box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with thin twine. “The Doorman just handed it to me. He said an old guy came by before you got in.”
He placed the parcel on Timika’s desk. Her name was written in unsteady block capitals in magic marker. There was no return address or sign that it had been through the post.
Not everyone was a fan of what the office produced. She usually received belligerent explanations in the mail, rather than actual hate mail, but she’d had her share of death threats from people angry because she’d picked apart or ridiculed the assumptions they considered true or even sacred. She held the package gingerly, weighing it.
Too light for a bomb, she thought. But not for anthrax or ricin or—more likely—talcum powder, which would shut the office down until they could get an all clear from the health department.
“I’m gonna open this outside,” she said, fishing scissors and rubber gloves from her desk drawer.
“You want me to come with?” Marvin asked. Audrey, Timika noted, was making no such offer and eyed the parcel warily.
“Nah, I’m good,” she answered. “If I’m not back in five minutes, call in the hazmat team.”
Marvin looked unsure. “Is the number in your Rolodex thingy?” he asked.
“I was kidding, Marvin,” said Timika, picking up the package and stalking out of the room with a pointed look at Audrey.
“Hey,” said the reporter with a better version of Marvin’s hands-up defensive gesture. “I just work here. You don’t pay me enough to get blown up.”
“Yeah,” muttered Timika as she pushed through the door and into the stairwell, drawing her scarlet raincoat tight to her body. “That’s what I figured.”
She didn’t really believe the package was dangerous, but she crossed to the square across the street and chose a bench away from two old people who were exercising their dogs. She opened the parcel carefully, donning the rubber gloves and slitting the paper, then turning the box upside down at arms’ length. No telltale white powder trickled out. When she lifted the lid, she found only a notebook. It was blue, hardbound, with a cloth cover stained with age and use. Inside the cover was an envelope, thick with heavy stationery covered in spidery script.
“Dear Miss Mars,” the letter began. “I hope to be talking you through the contents of this book in person since there is much to be explained, but in case I am not able to, I wanted you to understand something. The contents of this book are extremely important. I am confident that it will change your life and your sense of many things. It is also extremely dangerous. There are people who would kill me to prevent you from reading it and may attempt to kill you for doing so. For that I apologize. I will trust your judgment as to whether you will take that risk, though I am confident in my regard for your sense of ethical responsibility. Read. Investigate all I have to say. Check it. Subject i
t to your most rigorous ‘debunktion,’ then call me. My time is short, even if no one tries to make it shorter. Until then, I am sincerely yours, Jerzy Aaron Stern.”
His name was followed by a phone number.
Timika wasn’t sure what to make of it. It screamed conspiracy theory nonsense—especially the paranoid hinting about lives in danger, which was one of the major hallmarks of the genre—but the writing itself gave her pause. It was an old man’s writing, unsteady, but sophisticated, as was the phrasing. Most of what she received was a train wreck of small and capital letters, third-grade spelling and text-message punctuation. This felt … different.
She opened the notebook, carefully, feeling its age and startled to find that it contained more of the same longhand script, though the penmanship looked younger, more confident than the letter she’d just read. There were pages and pages of it, occasionally broken by little sketches and diagrams. It was clearly a journal, all entries carefully dated. She flipped to the front and caught her breath. The first entry, laid out in blue ink, the desiccated pages stained and smeared with dirt or even old blood, was labeled Kraków, Poland, 1939.
No way.
“You okay there, Timika?”
She looked up to find Marvin standing over her.
“You look kind of spooked. You need me to call those hazmat guys or something?”
She hesitated, staring at the first entry. “You know what, Marvin?” she said at last. “I’m really not sure.”
5
JERZY
Kraków, Poland, September 1939
THAT DATE MARKS WHERE IT STARTED. I AM WRITING this entry a decade later, in America and, as you can see, in English. I will write more from here as it happens, but my story begins before what I think of as the present so I am going back to my childhood in Poland. That, as I say, was when things started, though I did not know it at the time.
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE NAZIS CAME. SOME OF MY family had already fled, but most did not go far enough. They went to other parts of Europe, and the war eventually overtook them. I was told I had an uncle who made it to England, and a cousin who set out for America, though I do not know if she made it all the way. I lost touch with them as I lost touch with all my family. As far as I know, I am the only one who survived.
I remember the first days of the war only vaguely, and my memories are confused by things I read or saw later. I know that the day before the fighting started, I sat with a Polish soldier, a little man who smiled at me and ruffled my hair. He was the driver of a kind of little tank. It had a machine gun, and it seemed to me that it was the greatest, most terrible weapon imaginable. I do not know what happened to the man and his machine, but I think they were probably both destroyed within a day or two of our conversation. The Germans came fast and strong. There were stories of our soldiers armed with lances, riding against the German tanks on horseback. I do not think the stories were true, but I know that after a week, the war was largely over for us, or rather the fighting was over. The war went on much longer. Parts of me are still fighting it.
The Russians came from the north and east, and the Nazis from the west. I lived in a village close to the Czech border, surrounded by green forests. Some of the men from our area—including soldiers who had not been killed in the initial onslaught—were taken to work in the Škoda factories in Pilsen, but Jews like us were considered incapable of such work. At first, it was just strange, and for a few days, it seemed that Mama, Papa, Ishmael and I were the only people still living in the village, watched over by hundreds of German soldiers. I am sure my parents were very frightened, but they hid it as best they could. My brother and I were more confused than we were scared. Children, I think, are tougher than adults realize. Children adjust. In our case, we lived for—days? Weeks? I’m not sure. We had mainly hunger and isolation to complain of. Things changed when we had to leave the house we had lived in all our lives, but even as we were packed onto the train to Kraków, Papa managed to make it feel like an adventure, a kind of holiday.
It wasn’t, of course. It was a version of hell. Poverty and want are one thing in the country, but they are something entirely different in a city, particularly when you are packed into a few square blocks with thousands of others, many of whom were in worse condition than we were. I was still under twelve years of age then, so I did not have to wear the armband, and I remember feeling a peculiarly childish and conflicted form of shame at this. I was embarrassed for my parents and brother, who wore the yellow star, and relieved that I did not have to wear it, but I also carried a deeper, more insidious self-loathing because I was not standing with them. These feelings only deepened when my brother and I were taken away.
Ishmael was three years older than I, a strong and solid boy who knew more than he confessed to me about what was happening in our corner of the world. He had black hair and high cheekbones in a pale face, with eyes as dark as pools at night. I idolized him, and he, for his part, protected me.
“This will be over soon, little Jerzy,” he told me every night. “You see if it won’t. And when the Germans run screaming from the British bombers, you and me, we’ll chase ’em out, laughing at the tops of our lungs.”
But the British didn’t come. The war went on, and though the Russians changed sides, nothing changed in Poland. It became impossible to remember things had ever been different, or imagine that the world would ever go back to what it had been. I saw it in my mama’s eyes, in her drawn, haggard face, and in my father’s slow watchfulness when he looked at us. His life had been ambushed, redirected, and it would never get back to what it should be. My parents worked long hours in a munitions factory, coming home exhausted, their hands red from the chemicals.
We had been in the Kraków ghetto almost a year when the trucks came. They arrived early one morning in March. It was bitter cold, but everyone crowded into the square to see what was going on, in case there was food or other supplies. But the trucks were empty except for the guards. They were there to make selections for labor camps, packing eight men into the back of each truck.
My family hid, but when they came the next day, and the day after that, we began to wonder if the camps could be worse than where we were living, huddled with another family in what had once been a tool shed in someone’s garden. The walls were a single plank thick, and even with every blanket and coat we owned, the nights were unendurably cold. There was no toilet, no running water, and precious little food. One night, after a tiny meal of potatoes and pig fat, shared with two other families, our stomachs achingly hollow, my brother decided he had had enough.
“At least in the labor camps, they’ll feed us,” Ishmael urged that night, speaking to me in a hoarse whisper as we lay huddled for warmth. “I can’t stay here any longer. I’ll go mad. I’ll go work, and get fed. Then I’ll come back. I’m not afraid of work. It has to be better than here.”
It did not occur to him—or to me—that we would not be brought back to our families. I often wonder if my father overheard us. He said so little those days that it wasn’t always easy to tell when he was awake or when he was asleep.
The following day when the trucks came, Ishmael pushed to the front. He was, as I said, a big boy for his age, almost a man, and one of the officers spotted him immediately.
“My brother too,” he insisted, pulling me forward through the throng.
The officer looked me over disparagingly, but shrugged. He didn’t care who they took. I remember looking across the square, sorting through the anxious, drawn faces for my mother or father, but couldn’t see them.
I never saw them again.
Within months, the ghetto was purged. Many were killed in the streets. Others were herded onto trains and packed off on their one-way journey to Auschwitz.
We knew none of this. The full scale of it didn’t register for years. The horror of the so-called Final Solution was unimaginable to us. Even now, when I read about it, I find myself wrestling to visualize the enormity of the thing, even thoug
h I lived through it. Everyone knows the big number—six million dead—but that is not a figure the mind grasps easily. I suspect that for some, when placed in the context of the war, and the length of time it all took, and the sheer geography of it all, six million dead seems somehow … I don’t know. Ordinary? Understandable? Certainly, it is a kind of abstract knowledge, a fact without faces. But the terrible mathematics get worse when you think small. At Bełżek, at its busiest, Jews were unloaded from train cars at a fake railway station building, where they were stripped and their belongings confiscated, before being escorted into buildings for showers. Two hundred at a time. They were then gassed with carbon monoxide or Zyclon B. The process took about thirty minutes. Afterwards, dentists removed any gold teeth from the corpses with hammers, collecting as much as two cupfuls for melting. The bodies were buried in shallow graves, but the smell was said to carry for ten miles, so cremation became the order of the day. At Auschwitz, the ovens burned constantly, consuming a thousand bodies a day.
Somewhere among all those corpses were my parents. I didn’t know it for certain for another two and a half years, but the sense of something lost hung over Ishmael and me the very first night we were away from them. The trucks carrying my brother and me had left the city behind and rumbled on into the mountains, heading southwest towards the Czech border, familiar ground for us, so that in spite of our exhaustion, our hunger, and our uncertainty, we felt the thrill of returning to land we had known as children before the war. We looked at each other, grinning madly for the first time in months as we peered through the window slits in the truck walls and saw hills and church towers we knew. It was only when the sun began to set that we realized how far we had come, and how unlikely it was that we would be going back to Kraków and our parents any time soon.
I asked the guard, speaking in my faltering German—the one talent I had been able to use for my family—when we would go back, and he just sighed, almost as miserable to be there as we were.