Jocasta and Patricia: An Epilogue
Monday, May 6, 1974
Michael
It's another perfect spring day on the south slopes of the Magic Mountain. Temps this Monday morning are in the mid-50s, with cloud cover just hovering over the peak of Mt. Shasta. It feels like it might be a lenticular cloud day, Jo says to herself after having been up here for nearly a week straight and getting used to the ebbs and flows of the weather and environment around Shasta.
Jo's been babysitting Patricia since flying back from Marshall's momentous pool party last Tuesday. Jo and Patty watched Nixon take off from the White House lawn on May Day, and since then Patricia has been reading and watching all the news she can: issues of The Mount Shasta Herald and the Chronicle lay across the little kitchenette table in her bungalow. Headlines scream about FBI and CIA malfeasance, involvement in the Watergate break-ins thanks to Nixon's fingering them on the tapes released last Tuesday night, and countless other Cold War domestic and foreign crimes. It's gotten so the story of Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze getting shot to death in the desert and one Patricia Campbell Hearst being the likeliest suspect is relegated to Page 5 news in the Hearst machine's papers. Patricia's on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, but if you believe the opinion polls coming out in the wake of Nixon's resignation, most Americans (and even a good plurality of Nixon's silent majority) wouldn't think that list worth the paper it's printed on this morning.
And more huge geopolitical news in the papers that Jo delivers to Patty from down in the town: West German SPD chancellor Willy Brandt is stepping down after a scandal involving a Stasi agent, Günter Guillaume, in his most inner circle. It seems everywhere in the West, the inner workings of government, defense, and espiocracy are being slowly, gradually brought to light and the investigators are finding a lot of worms writhing under there while the governments of the world flail trying to keep their secrets under wraps.
Jo puts Patricia's coffee on the kitchenette table and Patricia comes out of the bedroom in jeans, a country-style blouse she's borrowed from Mary-Lynn, and a red kerchief around her long hair. She's taken to wearing sunglasses everywhere on campus here, even when she's inside this bungalow, which is most of the hours of the day. Jo's gone on some hikes with Patricia to keep her sane, but Jo can sense with Empathy that Patricia's starting to wonder if she traded a dank claustrophobic prison cell for merely a much nicer one.
Patricia takes a sip of her coffee; too hot. She sits back at the table and says to Jocasta, "Okay. Obviously things are way too hot for me out there. But what's going to happen to me now, Jo. I'd like to be patient about all this but I feel like I need to know sooner rather than later. It's beautiful here and the... yeah, the vibes are wonderful, but I need you to be as straight with me as you can now." Patricia takes off her sunglasses. "What's going to happen to me?"
Leonard
Jocasta, still cooling down from an early morning hike along the Sacramento River trail, sits across from Patricia and lights a cigarette. She almost offers one to her, but her mother's voice rings in her heard: Don't involve other people in your bad habits, Jocasta.
"I know this is a lot to take in, Patricia," she begins, in as soothing and calm a voice as she can muster. "I went through the same thing as you are, and my circumstances weren't nearly as...intense as yours, but believe me, I know how this all feels. I am going to be completely honest with you. The time for secrets is over, maybe over in a way that you may regret, once you learn...how things really are. But I am going to give it to you straight, or as straight as it can be in this twisted world, from now on."
She slides a file folder, heavy and brown and weighty like the government uses, across the table. Inside it are (carefully edited) personnel briefs on URIEL's main and peripheral members. "These are the people I work with. I trust them with my life, and it was in conjunction with them that I came to you. They trusted me to understand and empathize with you, but I know -- Patricia, I know -- that immediately, those feelings were not false. All the things that you've been reading about, all these headlines, these are at least partly the result of what happened when you came into our world. We have people who are experts at explaining what we do and why we do it, and you may meet some of them soon. We have others -- well, you see Genevieve Abeille in there, the writer? I think she would be perfect to break these things down for you."
Jocasta crushes out the cigarette and her voice takes on a heavier, more direct tone. She reaches across the table and holds Patricia's hand. "What I would like...what we all would like...is for you to join us. You're special, Patricia. More special than the SLA suspect; more special than I think you suspect. I think you can do an enormous amount of good in the world, at a time when things are changing faster than it's possible to comprehend." She pauses. "It will...not be easy. Your old life, it's gone. Gone forever. We can make Patricia Hearst a non-person, someone no more real than, than Jocasta Menos. Someone who used to be alive and disappeared. You can't go back. And it's rough, rough work. It will require you to make compromises, and it will force you into very dangerous situations. I have done things, oh, I have done things that would make you turn your back on me, things that even I never thought I would or could do in my old life. I almost feel ashamed at asking you, at twenty goddamn years old, to give up the rest of your life to this cause. All I can promise you is that the work is worth it. That we have an unprecedented chance to offer people liberation, liberation not just on political lines but from a kind of oppression that...well, that almost nobody realizes even exists."
She looks out the window of the small but cozy cabin, out at the beautiful day at this beautiful place. You are not taking this away from her, Jo tells herself. You are giving this to her. "But I want to be clear. I know how you were manipulated. I know how you were tricked and lied to. I know what they did to you. I won't exploit your trust to bind you to us. I've...we've been trying to do things differently lately, and this is a big part of that. If you don't want this -- if you want to walk away -- then you can walk away. We can help you disappear forever; we can help you become someone else; we can help you, tough as I think you've already realized it will be, go back to your old life. We are strong and have many resources. We can make it happen, and if we can't, I will make it happen myself. If you want to walk out that door, I will personally hold it open for you and make sure no one stops you. But you will not stop being special, and I trust you to make the choice that will do the most good. It's yours, Patricia."
Michael
(I'm outright dispensing with a die roll here. You two have been so deep in each other's minds and psyches over the past few weeks that it's not a case of a Reaction roll or a Diplomacy roll or something so mundane. Patricia's listening intently and with complete openness at what Jocasta says. Jo can tell Patricia's heart rate races when Jo mentions her old life being gone the first time, as well as when Jo hints at the kind of things she's had to do.
What it is a case of, is deciding what this post-rescue Patricia actually wants. Outside of the guilt over the bank robbery, outside of the realization that the story of her abduction is the story of her own government letting a mind-controlled snitch do this thing to her in order to discredit the Left. What she sees as her own future. And that will take some hashing out.)
Patricia sits there for a good while, a half a minute or more, looking back and forth from the file folders into Jo's eyes. "First of all, I don't ever want to go back. How could I, knowing what I know now? Those horrible things I said about... Daddy. And Steven. I didn't entirely not mean them, you know."
"You're smart to recognize I've had these kind of deals proposed to me over and over the past few months. From Cin—from DeFreeze. From the Poem. They each told me that we could change the world. Third time's the charm, you're telling me?" (She'll pause here, knowing she's being a bit provocative, but she will follow up pretty quickly afterwards.)
"You mention walking away, becoming someone else. It's an attractive proposition after all this, I won't lie, Jo. But someone would eventually find me. If not whoever your enemies are, then my father's people. He's probably hiring an army of PIs to find me before the FBI does. Or... the Bohemian Club." Jo takes a sip of coffee. "What Ambrose and Jack showed us last week, the story that 'Wine' was trying to tell me... those people... I don't want them in charge of the world anymore. I don't want to be manipulated or tortured by those people anymore." She taps one of the more sensational Examiner headlines about her whereabouts, her URIEL-planted legend starting to grow in between the lines of the news story. "Staying close to you seems like the best way to live authentically, truly, to not run away from what's happening."
Leonard
"Running away from the world...well, it's a problem I've had to deal with, time and time again. Marshall there," Jo says, gesturing at the folder and with a hard-to-read tone in her voice, "He has thoughts about that. I'm not offering you a solution to your problems, although I'll say, it might seem insane to think about, but your father and his people are maybe the least of them. Maybe I'm just offering you a different set of problems, swapping out one for another. But believe me: What you will do here matters. It makes a difference. Not in the way the SLA promised, a little easy bloodshed and a misguided gesture at revolution. Not the way of charity, however generous. Not like a poem that promises you some poetic turn-of-the-century fantasy. A real difference, whittling away at the actual foundations of why we all have to live this way."
She looks down at the folder and is hit with a strange wave of emotion, of warmth and pride and love and, yes, a little fear. "You will have to work with others. Even if you grow into the legend that we've created around you, if you become as important as I think you might, you'll have to compromise. But these people are...they're special too, Patricia. Roger really believes in doing for people what those hobby Maoists pretended to believe. Talking to Mitch...uh, well, it's not really that he clarifies the way things are. But he sees the world in a way that's changed me, even if I don't know what the hell it is half the time. And Archie, he's a good man. There aren't many like him. I'm actually excited for you to meet them. Still, I will always be there to advocate for you and to take you in the direction you want to go. We're building our power, we're filling out our ranks; we're going to make a difference, one way or another. You're not the only one we want to bring into this operation. But you're the one I picked. I knew from the first moment I reached out to you that you could help us change things, and you've already proved me right."
"What that means from here, again, you can decide. Meet with the others. Learn what...the world really is. We can hide you, we can train you, we can make you into anything or anyone you want. You tell us, and we can put you on the path. You can work in the field, like I do. You can research. You can become the legend. You can stay here, and help teach the kids. You can help Archie in the media. You can do something we haven't even thought of yet. But again, no one is going to make you do anything you don't want. I'll promise you that."
Michael
"I feel like," Patricia swallows and drifts off for a moment. "I feel like fate wanted to prepare me for what you're calling 'work in the field.' All this started with me finding that poem, I'm convinced of it. I don't think they would have surveilled and kidnapped me if it weren't for that poem. It's like a bad penny. It's following me around. But it also put me on this path. I didn't used to think in terms of 'fate,' but something's changed."
"They were such clowns," Patricia says with an indulgent smirk on her face, looking at an arraignment photo of the Cinque-less SLA (Willie Wolfe was detained separately on a 5150) on the front page (under the fold) of a Chronicle from last week. "So on fire to do something, so foolish. And yet they still taught me a lot that was legitimate."
But then Patricia's face falls. "Jo, I'm so sorry what happened that night at the safehouse. I can't offer any excuses about mind control or brainwashing or drugs. Or the poem wanting me to do it. It was a terrible violation of your trust to lead you into that situation, and I'm truly sorry."
Leonard
"Don't give it another thought. I've been in worse situations, believe me. And I was...well, I was trying to earn your trust, but I was being pretty cavalier about the truth with you as well. My job was to extract you, and I did what I had to do. I hope you can forgive me that. But that time is past. It's led us both to this moment. And for all the hell of it, for the fear and strangeness and uncertainty, I think this moment is for you what it was once for me: the first time anybody ever asked you what you really want."
Michael
Patricia really hasn't looked into any of the dossiers in front of her up to this point, but she takes this moment to open the big folder, look over the high-level biographical and skill capsules, the CVs hurtling across the globe from Los Angeles to Vietnam or Tel Aviv or Yugoslavia back to San Francisco. These quick glances, along with what Jo's said about the team, seem to confirm a lot of what she'd been suspecting already. The one unspoken question remains what makes these folks different from, say, the men who operated on Cinque, but regardless, Jocasta sees a look of openness and hope finally emerge on Patricia's face as she considers Jo's question of "what you really want." "Yes. I do know. I want to be an agent."
Leonard
Jo can't help herself: For what seems like the first time in ages, a wide, honest smile breaks out on her face. "I'm glad to hear that, Patricia. Really glad," she says, suffused with an optimism she hasn't felt in a while. She's been thinking so much about what she can do to help Patricia that she hadn't thought about how much Patricia can help her. "It's gonna get weird, I warn you. Not Hunter Thompson weird; more like...H.P. Lovecraft weird. You'll have a lot of important decisions to make. But I'll be here and so will the rest of us, as long as we can. For now, let's get out of here, maybe have a run, and then meet the rest of the crew. It's time to introduce you to URIEL."
