The Cruelty

I’ve recently read a few books that triggered the sequencing of some strange visions/dreams/memories I’ve had over the years. When you have a memory and can’t place it into context, this process seems to bring order to chaos, but it opens the door to the creation of narrative about things that never happened.

The Cruelty by Scott Bergstrom was recommended to me by Amazon, so I wondered if it would also trigger some sequencing of my memories.

Then again, my first reaction to this sequencing or remembering process was to feel like I missed someone I loved but couldn’t identify. I suspect that I was just very mentally scrambled because fear mixed with hope feels like love, even when a person is being abused.

I'm so tired. But I miss you so much. Whoever you are or were. The collective you. I'm supposed to hate everyone, but I don't. I'm not supposed to trust anyone, but I do. All I have is hope. I can't see any other way to live. 

After a nap, I'm really confused since all of my character profiles are bleeding together and I don't know which is which anymore. I need to read the source material in person. I think I'm just creating a mental profile of a certain type of person from a certain type of community. There are many commonalities, but what I want to know is the true story about the individual that I once met. I feel impatient and want to tie up the threads that have come loose. I'm a bit torn, but I'm a good healer. There are several leads that I'm not going to be able to drop since they feel thick, ropey, and connected to intact webs of mental information. I saw a group of people a few days ago walking down my street. They weren't from around here and they seem like a possible source of information. I would be open to meeting with them, but the person I want to meet the most doesn't have a face connected. I know it is possible that massive betrayals took place, but I'm not angry. It happened to another person in many ways, but I need to know who she was. Perhaps I need a good night of sleep first. I'll try a few drops of valerian and some herbal tea. 

Where is Gigi? I need him. Or rather, I think he needs me. I'm going to get a doctor's appointment today. I think I'm going to need support. 

I quickly figured out that doctors are not the solution here. The only way out is through the tunnel of confusion. Organizing the confusion with fictional stories helps.

The Cruelty is about a girl with a dead mother and since I believe that it is customary for the women who undergo a certain type of training to end up pregnant and deliver a baby before being sent out into the field on a dangerous mission, I think this book provides an example of how that situation might play out after the baby is born.

There is a biological father and an adoptive father in this book along with a married couple who watch after the girl while the adoptive father travels. If the mother is actually dead since almost 18 years then why the adoptive father misses the dead mother so much isn’t clear to me. Nor is the identity of the man clear to me.

Maybe angels singing will have the answers. Can that little boy hit a bad note?

Just call my name, I’ll be there… Rumpelstiltskin?

Peter Parker? I heard that Mary Jane died from his radioactive sperm.

James Bond? He has lots of fans.

In this book, the daughter was born at a US military base in Germany to an American mother, but this doesn’t ring any bells of familiarity for me.

Then I actually started to read the story and had my heart torn out. Her mother had a seven week old baby in March and was then arrested while trying to leave the hospital? I don't want to read any more because I think I know what happened to her mother next. 

The Cruelty is the sixth story Amazon has recommended to me of a 17 year old girl who was raised by a single father after her mother died and of the five of these books that were written after mine, each bears the marks of a deliberate attempt to thread in markers that identify my book as being uniquely similar to these books. As in, I think five of them might’ve been written in such a way that they would trigger Amazon’s algorithm to advertise them to me.

• The Ten Thousand Doors of January
• Song of the Forever Rains
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics
• Every Line of You
• Where the Crawdads Sing

When five of these books were written, it had been 17 years since I lost a year from my memory and I can’t help but wonder if these tales represent the histories of 17 year old girls who have been taken from women who had a year so bad that they had to forget it.

In The Cruelty, a girl has to rescue her father from some bad people and while there are some similarities with my book, I do not think it serves as an example of plagiarism or influence from my book — although influence is possible. It looks like someone wove in a thread from my book in order to make sure that Amazon’s algorithm identified them as similar. This would trigger them to be advertised to one another.

The Cruelty vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. Beheading with a blade in front of an audience is mentioned. This is probably the plot point that caused this book to get flagged as similar to mine.
2. The young woman feels alienated from her schoolmates because she is smart and not rich.
3. The young woman has lost her parent and is struggling with grief.
4. She and her handsome love interest bond over jazz music. p. 30
5. She has a supportive female mentor who explains how the world works.
6. She ventures into a forbidden place and discovers a coded message. p. 84
7. She meets a prostitute who offers to help her when she is living on the street.
8. She goes to an expensive dance club where there are scary men and prostitutes.
9. She leaves the club after a confrontation with a scary, boss guy. p. 186
10. She rides on a train.
11. She brings a vehicle to a premature stop via sabotage in order to escape from someone.
12. A cat makes an appearance.
13. She briefly meets a man who seemed like the first normal person she’d met in her new life.
14. She was sad to say goodbye to the man. She likes father figures.
15. She restores contact to her father and sets out into the unknown.

To me, this book looks like the story of a treasure hunt that the girl’s father arranged as part of her induction into a community of spies and in comparison to the experience of older candidates, I’m certain that the 17 year old girl in this story had a much easier initiation. There was no rape or sex. She is set up with a gay guy and just has to sneak around low places and act sharp. Once she tracks down a series of bank accounts, she’s in, sitting on a nest full of stolen money and needing to figure out how to do the accounting and distribution of it.

It seems that the basic story of the 17 year old motherless girl can end in many possible ways.

• In The Ten Thousand Doors of January, we see a motherless girl who has been raised to become the play thing of rich men. When she resists, she is locked in a mental institution.
• In Song of the Forever Rains, we see a girl who has been raised to be a liar, a thief, and to become the wife of a gross, old man who misses her dead mother.
• In Daughter of Smoke and Bone, we see a girl trained by an adoptive father to resurrect the dead. She has the option to live a normal life, but she chooses suffering instead.
• In Special Topics In Calamity Physics, we see a motherless girl who is abandoned by her father when she graduates from high school and gets into college.
• In The Cruelty, we see a motherless girl who has been raised to be a spy like her father who has been mentally damaged at the end of his career.
• In Where the Crawdads Sing, we see a motherless girl raised by a drunk, neglectful father in a backwoods swamp. She basically grows up alone in the woods.

How many babies named Gwendolyn were born seven weeks premature at the end of January 2003 with single fathers like this? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that to avoid pissing people off, one is allowed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs that draws a picture of the truth, but it is bad to be too succinct. I would’ve chosen a name like Gwendolyn.

…..

Because of how his departure was correlated with various anniversaries related to the baby’s mother, when I was reading, I anticipated that the father in The Cruelty had left the daughter to run off and find the dead mother — at least that is the romantic twist I give to everything, but I skipped ahead to the end and found out I was possibly wrong. The primary goal was to get the daughter to hunt down the source of the bank codes and take ownership of them from the man who was retiring (Bohdan). Somebody has to sit on top of the nest of dirty money and it might as well be a naïve, young woman. I hope they don’t turn her into a chicken. Meanwhile, the father’s mind was not okay after having given secrets to Israel in exchange for protection from the US.

In some ways, this feels like the sort of book a father or mother would write for a daughter who was curious about what it is like to have a career as a spy. It reads as a cautionary tale about a job you do not want to take. Instead of traumatizing her all at once via mind warping, artificial methods that are applied to 23 year olds, the 17 year old gets more straightforward, on the job training, but it is traumatic enough.

The great plot twist is that Bohdan, the man who kidnapped her father, is a CIA person who operates a market for the best of the Eastern European girls who are being sold as mistresses/prostitutes/slaves. He thinks of it as rescuing them from a worse fate and doing a job that would be deadlier in other hands. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had trained them as spies. Nevertheless, the ones who are too difficult to train end up getting packed into a shipping container with not enough water. In short, they die. To him this is war.

I’m very glad I didn’t end up dying in a locked, forgotten shipping container, but I also feel guilt when I remember seeing some of these trafficked women when I was in Greece. One of them handed me a note with her email address and told me that she had a master’s degree in Chemistry from an eastern European university. Due to some forgetting treatments I’d gotten, I was rather slow on the uptake at that point and lost the paper she gave me.

I wonder if the fact that I’d attended a more liberal university in my own country had gotten me labeled as a potential enemy of the state and that was why I’d been picked out for this gauntlet that resulted in the permanent damage of my brain. They leveraged me in every possible way during that year, thinking all the while that it wouldn’t matter since I’d either be killed or brain damaged at the end of it all. They sent me abroad where I was roofied and used as bait for an incriminating gang rape at a bachelor/hunting party, they framed me for serious financial crimes, drugged me and took embarrassing photos of me, sent me on a deadly mission, fried my brain and then used me as an example of disobedience when I expressed rage towards the man who had sent me through this gauntlet. Men from my own country were encouraged to hurt me while my mind was in an almost infantile state. They exploited and encouraged the men’s pre-existing hatred of educated women.

My guess is that a lot of the porn films that feature women who are taking severe abuse while smiling were created by people who had spent a considerable amount of time terrorizing those women. It takes a lot to completely disengage from your body and the people who engineer this state do so as a profession. (I once saw a film called Sexticemia and I couldn’t understand how the woman could be smiling.)

How could anyone be a part of an organization that tortures 23 year old interns, frames them for a bunch of crimes, sentences them to death, and then electrocutes them with an old-school thyratron in a grimy military prison, puts them in a freezer until they wake up, injects them with a paralytic before putting them in an gas-fired oven to scare them, steals their newborn baby, drowns them, sends them on a dangerous mission, fries their mind into a state of infancy, puts them in a ‘recovery facility’ full of men, shoots them in the head with an ion beam at a ‘cancer treatment facility’, gang rapes them while they are paralyzed and blindfolded on a veterinary table in a dog kennel before depositing them back into their original job and apartment? This modern day witch burning is insane.

Malala was shot in the head with a bullet in public for the crime of getting an education in an Arabian country and she won a Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, the US national laboratory system was secretly shooting women in the head with an ion beam for the crime of getting an education. Those women are all scared into silence because no one would ever believe such a crazy story.

I sure don’t. I’ve must’ve been visited by a crazy muse!

https://dribbble.com/shots/13360049-Flower-and-Plants-Illustration

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The image in the header is from: https://depositphotos.com/41931609/stock-photo-businessman-in-maze-and-city.html