1. The Voice
“I like his voice.”
Excuse me? I thought she was asleep next to me, all tucked in with layers of pillows over her head.
“His voice... What is that?”
A YouTube video played in the background as I dived nine levels deep into the internet rabbit hole. I wasn’t paying attention.
Some American preaching Second Amendment rights.
“What does that mean?” she asked, intrigued, her head poking out of the pillow fort.
Guns. He likes guns. He 3D-prints them.
She tilts her head a little. “I like guns,” she said, “make me feel safe.”
I had a rough idea what she meant.
She propped herself up on her elbow and hugged one of the goose down pillows, “what’s his name?”
Hmm, Wilson.
I half-expected her eyes to light up. They did.
“Bear?”
No. Don’t think they’re related. Trying to sound as matter of fact as possible, I knew what was going through her mind.
“But what’s his name?!”
Cody.
“Cody. I know what I’d name my corgi if I ever had one.”
Careful now. He’s one of the most dangerous men on earth, apparently.
Then she giggled like a little girl amused by the thought of a nonexistent happy corgi.
“Show me his video.”
I pushed my laptop over to her side. It was going on about something something crypto-anarchist.
She watched, more like contemplated. Taking in the words being articulated.
“Is he still alive?”
Afraid so.
“Where is he?”
Hmm, Texas. Austin. I think.
“Can we go? My visa should be good till 2023.”
Why?
“I want to meet Cody.”
What makes you think Cody wants to meet you?
“Well, I…I want to help.”
Do you remember what Jonathan said when you asked him to take you hunting?
“‘I don’t have the life in me to babysit you.’”
She gazed down and bit her lower lip.
Keys jiggling noise came from the front door of the apartment. I started to pack up.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
I will take you to the shooting range for your birthday, mkay?
She looked away.
A man came through the door and into her bedroom.
“Chérie, tu fais dodo?” said the man.
She buried her face in pillows and laid there on her queen bed in her pale pink velvet night gown, not moving an inch.
The man sat down at the foot the bed. He held one of her ankles and kissed her toes.
She recoiled slightly, “…oui?”
He reached out and tossed some pillows out of the way.
“Tu m’as manqué toi.”
She tried to feign sleep while he lifted up her gown and touched her thigh. She wore nothing underneath.
As his palm gripped on her shoulder blades then her neck, she turned and blinked a few times at him, trying to register his face.
“T’es belle tu sais?”
She nodded.
“Come to daddy,” he said.
I couldn’t watch. I had to leave.
Go to sleep.
February 2018. Switzerland.
2. The Book
It arrived in Amazon Global Priority delivery.
“Have you read it?” she waved it about like a prized possession.
Yes, on the train to Zurich. It’s a three-hour ride.
“He says ‘psychological homelessness’,” she made a face that read “are you seeing this shit”.
It reads like a prologue sets in 2012.
“He did say he was sending a message with the book.”
I got the message. But what is the end game? Is he preparing for civil war? And who is funding this? I have so many questions.
“Like, does the Liberator come in pink?”
Which pink though? Asking the important questions since 1991.
“#FB5858?”
My point is, I paused to take a sip of a box of organic birch sap, I don’t know enough to deduce his intentions.
“‘You were the person you were waiting for, after all’? Holy shit, this guy.” She tossed the book onto the bed and walked towards the closet. Time to prepare for the show.
Is this the game of quoting exclusively Cody Wilson for the next quarter?
“I think part of him does this for the lulz.”
Paying lawyers to fight the establishment, getting kind of stuck for years and feeling very, very frustrated? I think I’ve been there and there isn’t much lulz available in those situations, after a while at least.
“He does look quite angry in all of his photo ops, doesn’t he? Like he’s about to smash some baby rabbit into pulp. I hope at least his lawyer is cute like yours...”
She sat on the floor opposite to me and started painting her toes in a shade of red called “Russian roulette”.
“So what now? A Reddit AMA?” she asked, while carefully perfecting each stroke.
I put my armchair analyst hat on.
If this is about making guns great again, then he has picked a long hard battle in which he stands to lose. If this is about making libertarianism sexy again, it’s completely different gameplay.
“Well, your boy did make it to Sundance.”
Except now, nobody wants to play with a domestic terrorist.
“I have an appointment with my Lebanese hairdresser at 16h, finish your sentence.”
I hope he gives a keynote in Switzerland.
“The Art of War, eh?”
Point being, don’t play their game of lawfare. It’s rigged against us.
She shrugged, “I wonder what the tattoo says?”
I couldn’t understand why I even bothered.
March 2018. Switzerland.
3. The Hunt
We’ve binged an unhealthy amount of Cody Wilson on YouTube.
I mostly profile the guy and look for signs of deception and manipulation – while I’m touched by his eloquence, she can’t stop fantasizing the taste of his flesh.
What is your thing with these Internet cowboys?
She shakes her head and smiles. A sad, tired smile.
Sick of fucking traders, bankers, politicians and the like? The sadist in me enjoys watching her suffer a bit too much.
“I’m groomed to serve men, real men,” she puts it lightly.
Most men are “unworthy” of her attention - I’ve heard that one before. The boredom of watching them bickering about their petty, mundane lives.
“I was reading the book and, right at the beginning, something about him returning the camera at Best Buy almost killed me. I had to stop there and put it aside for a week…”
First, such practice was unknown to you; second, you’d die before you stand the humiliation of it.
She nods.
“If making men rich and happy is my so called destiny, and if – finally, I get to decide who to please – it would be someone like him.”
Back in 2012, it was you who said to me “the gentle soul has all the strength”.
Feigning surprise, “I thought I was the romantic?”, says she.
Somehow that stuck with me.
“Because you have a gentle soul… and a darkness.” She looks down and touches her hair. She is letting it grow – apparently, no one in Geneva is “worthy” enough to cut her hair.
“I’ll do anything just so he doesn’t turn into the villain. He doesn’t have to. He has seen so much hate... Hate. No one is listening. No one. Does it have to be this way? Is this the only way?”
She is talking to herself now - it is intimidating. I fake-cough as a cue for her to snap out of her trance.
So, what now? I have no idea where any of this is going.
“You’re the schemer, you tell me.”
Yes, I almost forgot – me, the planner; her - the doer.
Maybe you just need a corgi named Cody.
“Oh yes, so I can live vicariously through the puppy – ‘Cody, you such a good boi! Mawwww!’”
She babytalks to the imaginary corgi and I can’t get enough of her sarcasm.
If you do fuck him, I hope the whole thing gets filmed…for posterity. And just so we are certain that nobody gets honey-trapped like Julian did.
She laughs. “This is your idea of… radical transparency.”
More like… Rule 34.
“Amor fati.”
I have no idea what any of this means. She starts to sing an old song. A happy tune.
“Mon cheri si j’avais une heure, je reviendrais au printemps des fleurs…”
March 2018. Switzerland.
4. The Dragon
Year 20??
International Burlesque Star L*** A****** on her high-profile affair with wanted terrorist Cody Wilson
Why do I not believe Mr Wilson is dangerous? Well, for starters, any guy goes by the name Cody is harmless. It’s just the way things are. Cody is, how should I put it? His brain is too big for his own good. I’m here to dumb things down one notch. Also because Pamela Anderson called dibs on Assange so… A girl has to make do. Not to mention the Reason magazine called him a “serial trouble maker”. Bitch, HELLO? And oh, did I mention how safe I feel around Cody? My heartfelt thanks to the round-the-clock surveillance team they put on him. It must be hard on those guys...
Millennial Armchair Anarchist, Senior Specialist in Passive Aggression K** M****** on doing stuff
Hmm, so… I got accepted into this MA program in … Global Diplomacy, right. It was a last minute application, I didn’t even think they’d take me. But they did. I guess they needed the dough. So I’m like, fair enough. What now? So for my dissertation I’m just gonna write about WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden et al, how they render the current political system irrelevant and everything. And then throw in big words like the application of blockchain technologies and the open-source model in diplomacy to confuse the academics… One day I was browsing Reddit and one thing led to the other, I came across this dude, right. His name is Cody Wilson. He’s kinda cute. I mean he’s okay. He prints guns and caused a shitstorm in the U.S. and I’m like, what’s the big deal here? I don’t understand anything. I started doing some digging, right. Then I came to the conclusion that this guy is probably being a smartass and that pisses some people off. Then I thought maybe I should write about him in my dissertation… So I started researching him, right. This dude is like, super smart. Then I’m like, maybe I should ask him to supervise my dissertation process? I don’t know how these things work. Should I send him an email “Dear Mr Wilson…” Ugh. Not sure how he takes that. I can’t handle it if he tells me to fuck off. Even if he does so politely. I kinda wanna fly to Austin TX to visit his shop and everything and see what all the fuss is about. I don’t know shit about guns and now I’m flirting with the idea of getting one-on-one gun training… I don’t know?
April 2018. Switzerland.
5. The Drug
I’m reluctant to even admit but I might actually thank whoever laced my Beaujolais with LSD during my casual night out on the 17 January 2018. I’d had my fair share of recreational drug sampling to know what was being done to me. It was an urban legend and one of those things that until it happened to you, you wouldn’t believe it would happen at all.
In my drug fueled fever I was haunted by the vision of a man. Caucasian, stocky, dark hair, bearded and dressed in all black, guarding me in my sleep in the corner of my bedroom in what I thought was deep anguish as I drifted in and out of consciousness.
As I fully recovered from what I called a post-LSD psychosis after a week and began retracing my steps, I found a note on Google Keep that apparently says I love a man named Cody. It took me a month to contemplate what this all meant, and to research on a Cody R. Wilson in Texas who has made a documentary on the basis of the work of WikiLeaks. I asked myself if it was rationally justifiable to love someone famed for hate. As it turned out, it was rather effortless. Your book reads like like a prose from a long lost friend and your “monotone” voice is a low frequency vibration that tickles my ear. But it was your now-obsolete wall of tweets that broke my heart.
I was raised to distrust a man until he has his beliefs materialized in word form, and your words offer a map to the delicious labyrinth of your mind. On 28 February 2018 I penned my first love note to you. For the record: I hate it when you frown, and I only want to put a smile on your face. It matters very little to me whether my understanding of love to you that seemingly came out of nowhere will be reciprocated – I do enjoy the luxury of doing certain things exactly how I want them done. Perhaps I’m only in love with the man who wrote the book and not the man in flesh and blood, but this is a hypothesis waiting to be tested (or not).
If this has been entertaining to you, great. If it gives you hope and strength to fight your Promethean battles – you deserve no less. If this has been but a nuisance, please accept my apologies as this will be the last of my letters to you.
I was told a man once loved is capable of all things.
See you in Luxembourg? I promise I don’t bite on a first date.
June 2018. Switzerland.
