First Entry can be read here.
Hi. My name’s Zeke. I guess I’m here as a witness.
I’ve known Jacob since middle school, but I guess we became friends around college. We were the only two people in our freshmen orientation that knew each other, and the other kids there seemed like total weirdos. We became roommates by sophomore year. I dropped out of college a little bit later for personal reasons, but we stayed in touch. If I had to describe him to a stranger, I’d tell you he’s cold and quiet at first, maybe even a little bit of an asshole. But once you get to know him, he’s a real solid dude.
Will he mind if I call him an asshole? Maybe. But it’s not important, because Jacob will never hear this part of the story.
I suppose I know what you want me to say. You want to know if I believe Jacob’s story. Well, that’s complicated, seeing as how I don’t exactly know what Jacob’s story is anyway. I can at least verify that his accounts of my part in the story are accurate as far as I can recall. For a clip last year, every now and then Jacob would message me out of the blue, saying he had something important to tell me. And I’d wait, and I’d see the notification that Jacob is typing a message. But that second message would never send. Eventually, that notification would disappear, and I would figure he’d get around to telling me his whopper sooner or later. I’d forget about it, and then a week or so later the cycle would repeat. At some point I brought this goofiness to his attention, and I asked him if he was ever gonna tell me his story. And that’s when he started piecing things together.
I know that doesn’t really answer your question, but I don’t know that I can. The way I see it, it doesn’t rightly matter whether or not Jacob has 66 flamingos on his lawn at some point or another. The realness isn’t important to me. What I definitely, 100-percent believe to be real is that my friend is suffering. He has a story in his head that he desperately wants to get out there, and I’m going to do whatever I can to help him tell his story. That’s what’s real to me.
Over the last year, we’ve ran “experiments” in his garage to test the limits of his blackouts, what he calls his fugue states. He’s done these experiments nearly every day for the last year, as far as I know. As soon as he gets home from work, he’s either planning out or conducting a new experiment on himself. I help out as much as I can, but I’ve got a family of my own to take care of. I can’t spend all my free time in the garage with another man. The neighbors will start to talk.
But seriously though. My wife has set ground rules for me, and I try my best to respect them. No more than one visit to Jacob’s apartment per week. I’d be lying if I said it was a difficult rule to follow. If I’m being totally honest, sometimes it can be exhausting just dealing with all of this, even from the sidelines. But Jacob is my friend, and I plan on seeing him through this to some sort of closure.
Jacob has asked me to help with this as a contributor. That was his word choice. I expect it’s because he can’t use the words he wants to use. I suspect he wants me to make theories. He wants me to take his statements, along with my second-hand witness accounts, and make assumptions as to what I believe happened to him during some wild night in August 2016. It’s worth noting that I have brought these theories of mine to Jacob before. This, too, caused Jacob to suffer blackouts. When he recovered, he didn’t seem to have any memories regarding my theories. This is why I said earlier that Jacob will never hear this part of the story. He can’t keep these memories anyway.
Now these parts of the experiments are both good and bad news. The bad news is that a blackout brought on by one of my theories doesn’t necessarily mean that theory is true. Sometimes I’ve had theories that completely contradict each other and still cause blackouts just the same. My theory on theories is that a theory doesn’t have to be true to cause a blackout, just similar enough to cause an emotional response in Jacob.
Now that might sound bleak, but like that old saying goes: “No news is good news.” The time of each blackout is consistent with the statement given to Jacob. If I tell Jacob “I think that little green men came and abducted you,” then he’ll be in a daze for eleven minutes and 48 seconds. That was the time of his blackout when I told him that yesterday. When I told him the same thing last week and the week before, his blackouts were for the exact same amount of time, down to the second.
As Jacob mentioned in the previous section, we’re working on testing the assumption that the length and intensity of a blackout is linked to the “truth” of the statement. To use the previous example, when I change the wording to “I think that a little green man came and abducted you,” the time of the blackout changes slightly. Eleven minutes and 53 seconds. Changing the subject from “men” to “man” caused the time of the blackout to increase by five seconds.
Let’s be clear. Do I think a little green man came and abducted my friend? Of course not. But I do believe that there’s a sliver of truth in that haystack of horseshit, and divining it out is what we’re both here to do.
As Jacob mentioned previously, not all of our experiments gave us results. Most of these outcomes were pretty boring, BDSM-parts notwithstanding. I’m skipping ahead here and only including the bits I think are interesting or relevant.
Here I am listing a series of questions or statements I made to Jacob, along with whether or not a blackout occurred. If so, I documented the blackout length and intensity. We gauge blackout intensity in three levels: light, medium, and heavy. A light blackout causes Jacob to zone out and lose focus, but overall he can still answer simple questions and retains a bit of memory. A medium blackout means Jacob can’t answer questions or remember most of the experience, but he is overall awake and can function like a semi-human adult. A heavy blackout causes Jacob to go catatonic. His eyes go dead, and his muscles go rigid. He remembers nothing, which is probably for the best. When he’s like this, he looks like if he could talk, he’d be screaming. I really hate the heavy blackouts. To be honest, they scare the crap out of me.
There are a great many things we can take away from this data set. One, the intensity of a blackout seems to have no correlation to the length of a blackout. Two, his communication block seems to be tied heavily to a family member. Three, Jacob has incredibly strong repressed homosexual tendencies and urges. And four, there’s something to the mugging question. I’m just speculating here, but I really think that’s the best metaphor for his situation so far. I think something was stolen from him.
I’ll probably post more results here later if I get time, but I think this is a good start. I feel like we’re really close to an answer here.
Zeke again. Hi. It’s been a few months since my last update. The police have been investigating things. It’s been hard to squeeze in time for this.
Let’s rip off this bandaid right from the get-go. Jacob is dead. It’s been a whole thing. The police have finally ruled me out as a murder suspect, so I’m here to cap this whole project off with one final update.
Jacob hadn’t been responding to my calls or texts. It wasn’t unusual for Jacob to screen his calls and forget to answer back later. These things happen. But I checked the project server activity. He hadn’t made any updates since 9 days prior. It was a video file, manually started but uploaded automatically. Then nine days of silence. I was worried, but not enough to call the police. The idea of explaining this whole mess to strangers seemed more trouble than it was worth. So I felt like it might be a good time to check in on him.
I guess this is my time to be the unreliable narrator. I don’t have what you might call a chronological memory of what exactly I saw inside his house. I have bits and pieces that I’m still trying to put together. The authorities have an official statement from me that makes the whole thing sound concrete and standard. If you ever somehow get a hold of it, take it with a grain of salt. They knew I was innocent, but they couldn’t make heads or tails of my story, so they lead me through their version and told me to sign it. You know how cops are.
The smell might not be the most important detail, but I have to get that out there that first. The smell overrides everything. I can’t tell you anything about the story until I tell you about the smell of the house. Listen. I grew up rural. I’ve cleaned out septic tanks from the inside. I’ve seen dead cows fill up with gas until they pop. I know what a bad smell is like. I know when a smell is so bad it physically repels you from the area. That’s not what this was. This was the smell of something wrong. From the first moment I walked in the door I smelled a thing that should not, could not exist inside a normal house.
Now that the smell has been covered, I’ll try to move on. I rang his doorbell a few times, with no answer. Honestly more of a courtesy at this point, as I really didn’t expect anyone to answer. Jacob lived alone, no pets, no dating partners as far as I knew. Once I gave him the benefit of the doubt, I used a key to get in. He had given me a key to his house a couple months in for the project. One time he got stuck in the bondage cuffs and had to call me for help. I had to break a window to get in. After that he had a key made for me. The smell.
Sorry, I gotta leave that in. You need to understand. I remember this part clearly. The smell didn’t hit me once I went inside, or once I’d opened the door. It was the key. As soon as the key touched the lock, the smell was everywhere.
Things are a little hazy here. I remember criss-cross marks. His left arm looked like a prepared mango still in the skin. He had rolled up his shirt sleeve and handcuffed his left arm to the table, but his right arm dangled free. I remember a blackened box cutter at his feet. His chest was all slashed up, right through the shirt he was wearing. Why would he roll up his shirt sleeve to cut himself if he was just going to cut through the shirt anyway? Sorry, thinking out loud here.
I don’t remember calling the police. I must have, because they showed up. I would have checked my phone records, but in my time inside that house, my phone disappeared. You can imagine what the police thought. The whole place looked like some movie set for torture porn. They arrested me, obviously. Don’t really blame them there. I would have arrested me too.
Eventually they watched the video. Clearly, I wasn’t in it. To them, the whole thing was an elaborate suicide. But that still didn’t explain why I was there. They knew I had something to do with this whole thing. They asked me so many questions. They had so many theories about me, about us. At some point they even asked me if we were in some homosexual suicide pact. I regret to admit that, under the circumstances, I was too shaken up to make even a single joke about Jacob being totally gay for me. Rest in peace, cocksucker.
So anyway. Like I said earlier. Eventually they got tired of dealing with me. They knew it was a suicide, not a murder, and that was good enough for them. They lead me through an official statement and booted my ass out the door.
I still hadn’t seen the video yet. The police were never in a hurry to show me what they found. I may have passed by Jacob’s now-abandoned house a time or two to try and put things together. The lock had since been changed. I imagine any camera equipment and storage had since been removed and placed under state lockup. I never was able to smell that smell again outside his house. Not that I wanted to.
I had one card left to play before I gave up on this whole thing. No one seemed to realize Jacob’s videos were sent to a private internet server, away from his house. I had set up this server anonymously at work in a server closet when no one was watching. No, my work never found out. No, you don’t need to know where that is. Yes, I still work there. It was a close call when I got arrested, but don’t underestimate the value of a half-decent IT guy with no noticeable personality disorders or online gaming addictions.
I was back at work, but it took a couple weeks for the heat to die down enough for me to get the data I needed. And even after the flash drive was safely in my possession at home, it took me even longer to decide whether or not I actually wanted to watch it. I wanted answers, sure, but was I ready to watch my friend die?
The eventual answer was: I cheated. I skimmed through the video. It’s the best I could do. The video was over six hours long. Like hell I’m gonna watch all of that. Will I eventually finish it? No. As I said, this is my final entry. Will I post the video? No. Furthermore, fuck off.
Like I was saying, eventually I gathered the courage to skim the video. It was every bit as unpleasant as you might expect. But at least now I sort of understand. He told me he would tell us his story, even if it killed him. And it did. But he was prepared for it. He knew he would black out if he tried to say anything, so he used pain to keep him awake and sober while he said what he needed to say. That’s the way it started, anyway.
It took him a while to focus through the pain. The first few cuts gave nothing but incoherent babbling. The cuts were shallow and superficial. As the cuts got deeper, the screaming became louder and more ragged. I don’t know how the neighbors didn’t complain. Finally, nearly 10 minutes in, he got his first word out.
“Its”
The next word came three minutes and four cuts later.
“Still”
The next word came with a stab.
“Here”
I immediately stopped the video and fast-forwarded. Why? Fuck you.
I fast-forwarded more than I expected to. A few hours in. His left arm is torn to chunks and probably gone forever at this point. He’s already started on his chest. I kind of want to vomit. He’s not screaming anymore. His vocal cords have probably been blown out completely. He’s whispering now. I know I could make out what he’s saying if I turn up the volume.
I turn down the volume.
My friend is dying in front of me, literally dying to tell me his story. I mute the video.
Why am I watching this if I’m not going to honor Jake’s last wishes? I turn off the monitor.
I’m a fucking coward and my friend died for nothing if I don’t figure out why. I leave the room.
God damnit whether this is 66 flamingos or little green men or ghosts or mental disorders your friend was suffering and you are the only one who can make that suffering mean something stop being a piece of shit for once in your life.
I go back into the room and turn up the volume.
“Itoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitoutget”
I smell it again.
I buried all of my computer equipment in a locked box on a piece of land owned by another friend of mine. A good friend will help you bury whatever needs burying. I tossed in nearly everything. Even the speakers and network cables. As a last favor to Jacob, I set this unfinished project adrift out into the world.
Goodbye Jacob. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell your story the way you wanted. But from the get-go, I’ve been here to make theories. And my last theory is that no matter how much you want your story out, the rest of us need you to keep it in forever.