Everything went as planned for Shinya Yoshida. From his hideout, he could see John Rasmussen, frantically moving from screen to screen, trying to figure out what was happening to him. When the subject enters a prolonged period of isolation, paranoia starts taking over. When small details of his everyday life aren’t the way they used to be, it’s the whole realm of existence that takes a turn for the worse. That and the effect of sodium thiopental made Rasmussen’s nervous, nauseous and slightly dizzy, so it clouded his capacity of thinking.
The solution was in everything John had, in his fridge. Almost every item of food and most important in every beverage around his house. The only way he could resist the intoxication was to drink from the sink and eat vegetables and herbs from his garden in the backyard. That, Rasmussen didn’t know. By the time he would catch on to something, he would have lost consciousness so many times that a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere will enshroud him.
The target stumbled his way to the kitchen and took the milk jug from the fridge. He took a long chug. A chug so long he lost consciousness while drinking and crashed to the floor. Head trauma plus thiopental left Shinya more than thirty minutes to leave the hideout and start the second part of his plan. Rasmussen would be in enough confusion in order to get maximal results. Shinya Yoshida’s reputation was built around the maximal results he got out of his targets every time.
According to his timer, the family display took twenty-six minutes to install in the living room. There was a lot of heavy stuff movement involved, but Shinya had good employers this time and had the necessary means to make John Rasmussen’s life an uncomfortable nightmare. The second part of the plan was about that transition from weird, confused dream to downright nightmare. That part took a few weeks of subtle but thorough research. Artificially induced psychosis is a lot of work. Especially on a strong psyche that doesn’t have a history of drug abuse or prior physical or psychological trauma. John Rasmussen didn’t have any of these. In fact, he had a very good, unscathed self-esteem. Shinya Yoshida made sure his research would be more exhaustive so that nothing would leak through the cracks of the floor, but a strong self-esteem is something that you can’t buy. It’s hard to break and it requires thinking outside the box.
Rasmussen was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1970. Shinya couldn’t pin a name on his mother, but his father, Arthur Rasmussen Sr. was Dayton’s mayor from 1974 to 1990. He was a strong, broad shouldered man with a thick brown mustache and a perpetual serious look on his face. When Shinya looked at an old sepia picture of Rasmussen’s father, he remembered of this era where people were not allowed to have fun. Dayton’s municipal records were crammed full of memorabilia about their most iconic mayor. He was a strong, iron-gripped mayor with “ideals”. He fought back many industrial and real estate schemes in order to “keep the bucolic beauty of Dayton”. He died in his office from a heart attack in August of 1990. The journalist, a certain Julia Windham called it a “kingly goodbye”. Articles were dithyrambic to him. So much, they sounded wrong. Shinya called then the editor of the Dayton Times to get a solid, objective view from the character.
The editor was named Billy Williams. He had retired in 2006 and lived now in Key West, trying to capture the essence of the life of Ernest Hemingway’s books. Shinya had a limited experience of the journalistic world, but noticed a strong tendency with journalists being failed authors. Williams told him that Rasmussen was a rumor mill, but that the newspaper couldn’t gather enough political influence in order to call the shots. The mayor has his own writer, a man named Greg Hytham, who wrote the articles under the identity of Windham, who was nothing but a secretary in the newspaper office.
What Williams said that interested Shinya Yoshida was that Mayor Rasmussen had a troublesome relationship with his sons Hans, John and Morten. Hans left for the U.S Army at 16 and was dispatched in South America somewhere in the eighties. After that, his trace was lost. John got arrested a lot while growing up. Mostly for vandalism, littering and lewd behavior. The way Williams described him, he sounded like nothing more than an anarchist thug. The most interesting son for Shinya was Morten. The kid committed suicide at the age of 15. He hung himself in his room on October 25th of 1988, a few months after John turned 18.
John Rasmussen was a paranoid lone-nut writer with a Robin Hood complex. The more Shinya Yoshida learned about him, the more he was glad for the opportunity to challenge his skills against such an interesting and reputable target. Security and family were the two issues where Rasmussen could potentially show a weak spot. Shinya Yoshida prepared a dangerous cocktail of both that he hoped would crumble the writer’s mind and ego.
When he woke up, John Rasmussen saw the reality through an ethereal filter of clouds. He stumbled his way across the compound, unsure of where he was going. There was a light in one of the rooms that he wasn’t sure to recognize. A strange, distorted, stroboscopic pink light. The room was filled up with smoke, but didn’t look like it was on fire. There was a party going on in there. “Down On The Corner” from Creedence Clearwater Revival was loud in the speakers, which John didn’t noticed before he got in the room. On the couch was Henry, his father. His brother Hans was standing in the corner in uniform, holding a drink and in the middle of the room was hanging Morten, a macabre piñata in a party of dead people. John sat on the couch and lost consciousness again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment