Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Monica went online and Googled Dr. Charles Nevitsky. Over sixty thousand pages turned up on him. He was considered one of the great minds of the 20 thCentury. You couldn’t graduate with a psychology degree without having to write at least one paper on him. He was the first person to take the works of Skinner and European Existentialism and combine them into one psychology — cognitive behavioral therapy. She read that he was still alive, living less than two hours away. She became excited, but also filled with anxiety. She thought it was a stupid lead but she had to do something. She kept thinking that it all seemed stupid. Why would NEOTAP make one of its own employees disappear? Why would the world of humans create buildings where people get treated like shit and if they have an opinion about how shitty they are being treated, they make them disappear?

She went into the kitchen and found the old man sitting there. He looked sad. “Do you have a gun?” Monica asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“I think I might need it to get Michael back.”

“Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

“Yes, my dad taught me. He would take me out to the woods and we would shoot pop cans. I wasn’t a bad shot.”

“Listen to me. Don’t forget to have fun.”

Monica was surprised. “How can this be fun?”

“You won’t find him unless you are having fun. Remember that the assholes who took him, the assholes who run this world, are having loads of fun being big and powerful, being assholes. You won’t defeat them unless you love this, unless you are also having fun, unless you are having more fun than them.”

Monica stood there. She had never thought about hunting down a fellow human, and she never thought of it as being fun. Then she remembered Benny Baradat in the coffee shop talking about fun. She wondered why all these crazy white men were talking about fun in the face of all these shitty things.

The old man walked into the living room and she followed him. He pulled a handgun, a small black revolver, from a chest. He held the gun along with some bullets. “Take it,” he said.

Monica held out her small hand and he placed the gun there. Then he pulled out a shoulder holster and said, “Put it on.”

Monica took off her coat and put it on. She fixed the straps so it fit nicely. She practiced taking out the gun a couple of times. She smiled and felt powerful holding the gun. She wanted Mike back. She wanted to end NEOTAP and all its stupid shit. She even wanted crazy Sherwood Burke back and all the criminals from NEOTAP. She started to feel strong and confident with the gun so close to heart.

She told the old man, “I will find him.”

“I know, because you have to,” he said.

Monica left.

The old man sat down at the kitchen table. He had read history books and knew the power of governments, and he felt scared for Monica.

Monica drove to her house to see her father and pick up a few things. She went inside the house. She felt strange looking at it. She felt like it might be the last time she ever looked at the house. It made her look deeper at the pictures of her and her father standing by the ocean. Everything seemed more real, full of color, the couch, the kitchen, even the bathtub, all the objects in the house were full of memories.

She came out of her bedroom carrying a backpack. Her father, sitting on a recliner watching television, said, “Where you off to, Monica?”

“On a little vacation.”

“How come you never told me about it?”

“It just came up. It’s only for four days. Going to Chicago.” She thought Chicago sounded nice. Chicago was her favorite place to go for a few days at a time.

“Oh, well give me a hug.”

She knew that every time she went on vacation, they would tell each other ‘I love you.’ This would give her a perfect chance to do so without revealing her true plans.

They hugged and told each other ‘I love you.’ She hugged her father for an unusually long time. After she walked out the door, she began to cry.

Monica experienced terrible anxiety while driving to Nevitsky’s house. She pulled the car into a gas station parking lot. She opened her purse and took out a Xanax and an Adderall and swallowed them both at once. She liked the feel of the Adderall pumping her up. Adderall made her excited, gave her powerful feelings of confidence. She would take the Xanax to calm the anxiety caused by the Adderall. She had never told anyone that she regularly took pills to feel good. Mike knew and took them sometimes with her, but mostly she kept it a secret.

Monica felt that pills made life exciting. It was exciting to troubleshoot on a computer, it was exciting to have sex, it was exciting to take a hike in the woods. But it did not make her body feel excited. She considered pills a little vacation for her body.

She decided that to do this whole thing, to find Mike, she needed drugs. She wasn’t going to be able to be confident and strong without drugs. She knew that without drugs she was a timid little girl who just wanted to play on her computer. She knew the situation required her to live up to the task.

Monica arrived at Dr. Charles Nevitsky’s house. It was a large two-story house. It was old but well-kept. She looked at his house, afraid, but she wanted to find Michael, wanted to hold Michael again. She liked cuddling Michael at night and she didn’t want that to disappear from her life.

She knocked on the door.

She waited.

The door opened.

An old man stood there, feeble and sad. He was bald, had red blotchy skin and long bushy eyebrows that stuck straight out. He looked professional though. He had on a nice shirt and nice pants. He still had grace and composure. He was elegant, he was strong, a man to be feared.

Monica looked at him and he looked at her.

Nevitsky said to Monica, “What would you like?”

Monica’s Adderall had kicked in and she felt awesome. She said, “I need to find my man.”

“Come in,” he said.

They walked into the living room. Nevitsky walked slowly, limping a little from brain cancer he’d had several years ago. Nevitsky had not changed his habits from his youth. He knew negotiations required liquor. Nevitsky poured some scotch and said, “What do you drink? I don’t think your generation drinks scotch, no?”

“Do you have any spiced rum?”

“Spiced rum. What a generation.”

Nevitsky found some spiced rum and poured her a glass. He handed it to Monica and said, “So what is the problem?” He sat down, took on an active listening pose.

“I work at a place called NEOTAP. NEOTAP is a government treatment center for criminals. Well, I work IT, but my boyfriend works as a guard and, like, now he’s disappeared. And some of the prisoners have also disappeared. So has another employee.”

“But what does it have to do with me?”

“Well, the place is based on your book Reality Conversion .”

Nevitsky sat there thinking, trying to remember writing Reality Conversion, why he wrote it, what was going on in his life when he wrote it, what that book meant to his life. Finally he said, “They are still using that book?”

“Yes.”

“My god, that book was written to defeat the Soviets. The Soviets have been gone for twenty years. There is no reason to use that book anymore.”

“What? I don’t understand,” Monica said, confused.

Dr. Charles Nevitsky, besides being a psychologist, was a professor for a good portion of his life. He was a man who liked to talk, but he hadn’t had an audience in over ten years. Everyone had forgotten him and how he was a great psychologist. Sometimes a student writing a doctoral thesis would come by and ask him a few questions, but that was becoming rarer as the years passed. He grew excited to talk. This girl looked like one of his students from the past: young, pretty, and full of life.