Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

10:34 P.M._

Kold’s phone rang unexpectedly and the Lawyer was forced to switch off the recording.

“Hallo!” Kold answered laconically. “Yes. Yes, I am busy. Mrs. Morisson, I can’t accept you. No, I am not obliged to report to you… Well, I have a meeting with my lawyer. No, everything is all right. Yes, all the best.”

He switched off his phone, leaned back the chair and sighed.

“Sometimes it seems to me that Cassandzhi deployed Morisson to spy on me. Who does she transfer information to?”

“These people help you, don’t they?” the Lawyer said, surprised. “In my opinion, it was they who managed to contact diplomats from Ecuador…”

“Ok!” Kold moved forward suddenly, interrupting him. “This is exactly why I don’t want… I have to be careful, you understand, and there… there everything is too simple and too much like a baited trap. You asked the question: why have I chosen Russia? For the moment, I’ll just say this: prospects. Here there are prospects. Room for manoeuvre, do you see? And I have a feeling that I can just get so lost here I won’t be found by the CIA, or MI6, or archangels of our Lord. But Latin America is the backyard of the United States! No, after giving it some thought, I realized I wouldn’t like to be there. And one more important point – I would maybe consider offers from Ecuador and Venezuela more carefully if I wasn’t pushed by Cassandzhi…”

File 005.wav

“Before going on with my story about the Garage and the incidents that came after, I just want to say a few words about 9/11. When it all happened, I was just beginning college. It was an ordinary day, a Tuesday, with nothing untoward going on. Then suddenly all the TVs around the college hall and in the snackbar – even in the security guards’ room – began to show the towers of the World Trade Center and these planes crashing into them.

Everyone was crowding around the screens. There were lots of people crying. And some just asking: ‘What do we do now, what now?’ And when the message came that more planes with alleged terrorists were in the air and one of them was heading directly for the White House, there was almost panic. Two ambulances arrived as one of the schoolgirls and the teacher, Mr. Hopkins, felt ill.

For some reason, this didn’t make that strong of an impression on me. No, of course, it was awful that people died – innocent and civil, as my father used to say. Yes, people died, but this death in the air seemed to be designed for salesmen and housewives. In a word, it looked as though it had been written in advance cinematically according to a scenario. Maybe, though, my muted reaction to the terrorist attacks in New York was linked to the divorce of my parents and internal experiences which eclipsed them. I don’t know.

Of course, I read lots about it, and watched the films shot by supporters and opponents of various versions. Then at last, when I worked in the National Security Agency, I tried just for the sake of interest to learn the ‘truth’, but encountered a very powerful system of concealment of information.

It was organized in such a way that anyone who wanted to delve into the facts came up against what seemed to be mere coincidences, pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor in the dark room on which Confucius’s cat seemed to have scampered about. The creators of the TV series The X-files were right – the truth is still somewhere nearby.

Anyway, let me go back to the Garage. It regularly arranged exhibitions and open days of contemporary art – well, in the way that garagers understood it! I’ve already told you some examples and that’s enough because it is really not too appetizing! But I will say that the Garage gave me a lot of knowledge about various movements in painting, sculpture and graphic and other arts.

Before knowing Neolani and the others, I had heard only about surrealism, and that thanks to the reproduction of Dali’s ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening’ hanging in Judith’s room. But to be honest, it was the naked woman that drew my attention to the picture, not surrealism.

In the Garage, I was very simply and intelligibly, with examples, introduced to the way one style of a contemporary art differs from another. Frisbee and Neolani taught me.

‘Here look,’ said Neo, quickly sketching the contours of a horse on a piece of writing paper. ‘I am drawing a stallion the way it is, with dirty hoofs and a throbbing dick – this is realism. Now…’ she took some felt-tip pens, ‘We will paint our horsey in a blue with scarlet hair. That will be expressionism. And now we will add a shovel to the dick, skates on the hoofs, and on its back we will paint a portrait of the Pope. That is surrealism. Pass me the charcoal, Fris!’

With the charcoal she sharply delineated all the contours of an initial horse, then divided it into geometrical figures, after slightly modifying the positions of the head and tail.

‘That’s cubism. And if I turn everything into a black square with a white circle and write ‘horse’ sideways, that’s suprematism. Oh, I forgot – if right at the beginning we painted the horse with various pastel tones and blurred contours, that would be impressionism.’

‘If there is only a circle tracing out the horse’s hoof, that’s minimalism,’ Frisbee intervened. ‘And if all of it is smeared with horse shit. Then it is ‘active painting’ mixed with Dadaism. Do you get it, Joshy-boy?’

‘In general,’ I laughed. ‘And do you want me to tell you something useful about programming in the statically compiled language ‘C-plus-plus’ or about html design?’

‘Buddha forbid’ they yelled in unison and ran off in feigned horror, leaving me alone with the image of a horse.

Besides art, the garagers were involved with various social and political movements. We regularly wrote trials for the renegade websites, picketed the local chemical plant, supported Greenpeace, printed Che Guevara’s portrait on red teeshirts for the antiglobalists who were going to go to fight the police somewhere in Europe and illegally replicated disks of musicians like Manu Chao because he was singing songs of protest.

Once I went with Neolani and other garagers to Baltimore on a demo in support of Dmitry Sklyarov, the hacker from Russia. This pretzel wrote the ‘Advanced eBook Processor’ program, which easily bypassed the protection of PDF files, designed by ADOBE specifically so that nobody could copy anything from them.

Under American law what Dmitry had done was illegal, but it wasn’t under Russian law – so his firm quietly traded the program created by him, and everything was good.

Then Dmitry was invited to a computer conference in San Francisco, and even wrote a paper, but he was arrested by FBI agents there and thrown into prison.

Well, of course, normal people all over the country were strongly indignant – because if this Russian was jailed today just for doing his job well, then tomorrow one of us might be jailed just because we’ve written something on the internet. Something ‘not acceptable’ from the point of view of the authorities, I mean.

However, I always felt there was some wormhole in this story, something hidden from the spotlight, some nasty twist you couldn’t quite express.

In fact, Dmitry’s program allowed you to steal information, and theft is always bad wherever it happens – in a shop, at a BP gas station or on the internet.

But on the other hand thousands of people claim that information has to be free. Do people pay for something that they hear on the street, on the train, in a wood or in a field?

I didn’t really think that deeply about it, though. For me, it was enough that Neolani and the garagers, my friends, were for Dmitry – so, then, was I.

We went in two cars. The guys went in an old Ford with a big panel saying ‘Release Dmitry!’ and Neo and I went in a small Toyota. We were picking up some weed from some acquaintances of Neo’s so after the demo they could really get their rocks off.

We chatted and made out all the way and a few times we nearly came off the highway. Neo’s little beast was as fast as a track car, though she said it was a cheap Japanese model.

After Pasadena, we turned left before Glen Bernie onto the street with the amusing name Avahart Road. But there was nothing else amusing in that street. In fact, nothing in that whole district. It was ‘frankly shit’ as Pincher would say. But it’s in exactly that kind of place that drug dealers live.

Neo stopped the car near a two-storey house covered in plastic plates. This, it seems, is called siding. In Wilmington, only snackbars or municipal buildings are sheathed that way.

‘Come on,’ Neo said and dragged me along. I smiled – I’d learned a cool smile to say, don’t worry about me – and got out of the car to follow her. Of course, there was always the thought that drug dealers aren’t too keen on extra eyes and ears in their work.

When Neo pulled out a key to open the door, I was really surprised. Then she took off her shoes, presumably because there were mats everywhere. I took my shoes off too.

We went into the house, passed through a big room with a sofa and fireplace, and slid between a curtain with Chinese bamboo bells and dream-catchers into another room. Here, probably, lived a mad hippie-nymphomaniac artist. All the walls were covered in drawings and pictures in which naked women were depicted in obscene poses. Women were fucking with live snakes, giving birth to toads, vomiting severed dicks and other activities which made me genuinely nauseous.

‘Look at the books here. I’m going to the attic for weed,’ Neolani said, and I listened to her bare feet pad up the wooden steps of a ladder.

There were certainly books on the shelves, a lot of books. I’d only seen so many in the school library before. Well, except perhaps in Mr. Isenberg’s office where he had a huge case.

We didn’t have books at home and none of my friends did either. No, the Bible doesn’t count. My schoolmate, Mathew Turkle still had some ancient books from Europe, either his great-grandfather brought them, or his great-great-grandfather. Pictures in these were black-and-white, creepy – various demons with a skeletal knight on a horse fighting against them. The book wasn’t written in English, and I didn’t understand the name, but something was about Don Quixote de la something else.

Neolani’s books were very different. I read the names of the authors on their spines: Huxley, Camus, Heinlein, Orwell, Ortega y Gasset, Fukuyama – and realized they meant practically nothing to me. Besides that there were some books that seemed totally nonsense to me: Huang-di, Lao-Tzu, Gian Daolin, Ge Xuan and Five Pecks of Rice.

My attention was drawn by a big, black book with the intricate, clear name of The Anarchist Cookbook by a certain William Powell.

I opened it at random and read: ‘Cooking with marijuana. Many people throw away the seeds, stalks, and branches after purification of raw materials. I strongly recommend you to keep them since there are many recipes for using this waste’. And there followed simple and detailed instructions for making marijuana tea. I turned the page. Here it gave a recipe for narcotic desserts. ‘This Mr. Powell was rather inventive,’ I thought, flicking through the book. ‘But what have anarchists to do with this? So what next?”

The answer came with LSD, where it explored Artaud’s and Huxley’s experiments with mescaline and peyote and talked about Artaud’s idea of the creation of a great society based on psychotropic drugs. Peyote changed Artaud. He found he could comprehend and understand ideas on another level. He could depart from rationalism, and even the modern truth. Artaud found his own truth and own structures. But they locked him up.

The lines were so-so, of course, but the story is about a person who describes his own apparent death, under the influence of LSD. It interested me, and I began to read further: ‘Preparation of LSD in laboratory. To synthesize acid, you need knowledge of fundamentals of chemistry and access to a laboratory.’ And Powell went on to give a simple recipe.

But I don’t understand chemistry so this was boring. Flicking through further, I came across peyote. It always seemed to me some dull Mexican cactus. But the author of the book revealed that this nondescript plant contains the strong psychedelic mescaline, and described his first powerful encounter with it.

Neolani was taking a long time. I listened to the sounds from above, but I could hear nothing but faint muttering, including a woman’s voice. It was baking hot and I was thirsty. We needed to get to the rendezvous point for the demonstration and time already was short.

I was going to call Neo, but decided to wait five more minutes for decency, and I was again engaged in the book. My next finding was a chapter named ‘A Treatise About Toads’ in which he described the extraction of a hallucinogen called bufotenin from the skin of toads…

‘Here,’ I showed her. ‘Interesting book.’

‘Second-hand stuff,’ she contemptuously pulled her shoulder. ‘Compositions of Uncle Billy and his disciples. Ok, let’s go, I have the weed. Real Mexican, from Chihuahua!’

I put the book down, and we went out.

‘Whose house is it?’ I asked when Neo closed the door.

‘Oh, just…’ she fell silent then answered abruptly as we got near the car: ‘My parents.’

All the rest of the day in Baltimore, we horsed around, drank beer in the lanes and gateways where there were no police officers, then we were dumped on by some local citizen. Or a few locals. Some nose in a window saw that minors were drinking beer behind a store, and called the cops. They arrived, but we ran away. It was a riot!

As we ran, we ran into a procession of evangelists and got lost in the crowd, just as in a film. We slipped away from the cops. So all of us got lost in the melee.

We hung out with some goths and some gays from Washington, and marched through the streets with posters and shouted: ‘Freedom for Dmitry, May he screw up together with his shitty Rushka!’

Do you think we had much interest in this hacker? Absolutely none! We were just having fun. Yes, there those principled people at this fucking demonstration who raised fists and were ready to dive under the wheels of police cars. But did we care? We were free artists, we lived in the present.

After the demo, everyone – except me, you remember the oath – smoked weed on the riverbank, hiding under the bridge. Seven or so black guys leaned over the bridge and kept taunting us, sneering: ‘Whad-ya-lookin-at, snowballs?’ But we were a big group, and there were the goths and gays from Washington, too. So they didn’t pursue it – and anyway the guys were stoned, and none of us gave a damn.

At night we ripped flags off buildings. They were hung on every building in Downtown Baltimore in triplets – the US national flag, the flag of the State of Maryland and a flag with a municipal coat of arms. Pincher was the first to jump up, grab all three at once and yank them off with a noisy rending sound.

I remember at some point I flinched from the cognitive dissonance, yet all my life, all my eighteen years, everything around me, at home and at school, in the street and on TV, had drummed into me (and other children) that our star-spangled banner was our key and almost sacred symbol.

From my first days in school, I had learned the rules of what can and must never be done with a flag of the USA by heart! It should never be dipped to any person or thing even if the flags of states, military banners and other flags are dipped in their honour. It should never be raised upside down, except as a distress signal. It should never be raised so low that it touches something beneath it: the earth, a floor, water, other objects. It should never be borne on a flagpole with the pole horizontal (the flag shall always be carried at an angle). It should never be raised so that it could be damaged or soiled. One should never write or draw something on a flag; or wrap something in a flag; or use it as clothes, bed linen or draperies, or in a suit or on sportswear – though at the same time the image of a flag can be sewn for members of the patriotic organizations, military, police and firefighters. One must never use a flag for advertising and promotion of goods or print its image on napkins, boxes and other disposable objects.

Pincher broke several of these rules as he wrapped himself in a flag, blew his nose on its hem, then tore off a strip and put it in his trousers in the manner of a diaper. I wanted to tell him that, probably, he shouldn’t do it. But Frisbee shouted that Pincher looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, and everybody laughed loudly, including me. And as my friends were under the influence of weed, they just couldn’t stop.

We hobbled along the street and tore more flags off. Some tied them as scarfs, some as Roman togas or Superman’s cape. For some reason, I tied a flag on a belt as a Scottish kilt and danced a wild jig with Neolani, yelling that we were from Clan Macleod and that there can only be one.

Of course, the police were called, as people peeped from their windows to see us up to all kinds of tricks, and breaking the peace and all kinds of state laws. But it was dark. And as the sirens wailed from the next block, we scurried into the slums and away.

Well, not slums really, but warehouses down by the railroad. We spent the night there on boxes and containers covered with tarpaulin, smoking weed before sleeping.

Under the tarpaulin, it was warm and easy to smoke. Some puffed smoke, others just breathed it in and felt high. They also invited me in, but I got out and sat down in the wind. Firstly, because of my oath, and secondly, it had all become rather revolting…

When we got back to college, life swept on indifferently. The ripped flags were nothing to most of us, a prank with no consequences and leaving no memories.

It haunted me, though, and once when Neo and I went to the Garage together, I suddenly told her it is wrong behave like this with a flag. I didn’t expect an answer, I just needed to express my feelings. But she did answer, and seriously, without any of her favourite words, like an exam:

‘Flags, anthems – these are all external symbols. A transferral of concepts. Do you understand?’

I shook my head.

‘Well. Fabric alone. Words alone. They mean nothing. But you can create fetishes out of them. ‘Don’t create an idol for yourself’ remember?’

I shook my head again. It wasn’t that her words were unclear; I just didn’t want to agree with them.

‘Oh, well!’ Neolani stamped her foot in indignation. ‘I’ll get you the book, and you can read everything…’

And she really did bring me the book. I don’t remember the name, but it was about Buddhism, about its various trends, about philosophical schools and wise men who lived a thousand years ago. Why was I interested? Probably because Neo liked it.

Not that I got the idea of all these allegories and abstract definitions straight away. How could I, an American teenager, understand what Tao is, especially if you consider that even now, as a thirty-year-old, I don’t really get it. I’m absolutely sure that no one in their senses and sober will say to himself: ‘I have learned Tao!’.

All the same, there were different scientific definitions, using clever words like immanence, and transcendence and undifferentiated emptiness, but what are they to me?

To me, as an IT specialist, it is clear from Lao Zi’s words that Tao generates one, the unit generates a pair – Yin and Yang – which generate three and reveal the entire world.

So Tao is a binary code, a source of all forms. But according to Lao Tzu, Tao is at the same time the energy which forms all processes of creation, and creation itself. It is the creating spirit which creates and destroys – but creation and destruction equally create and maintain this world, ensuring its existence in the form we know. Tao is also the balance of good and evil, again a binary code, and, I think, is also love, because how is anything possible without it?

I enjoyed reading the Taoist sages much more than the Buddha. Neo brought me the book of the writings of the great taoists – the Yellow emperor Huang-di and others. Of course, much of it was seriously obscure, but some of the formulations bewitched me with their refined absurdity:

This is my favourite Lao Tzu. Think about this, and in these phrases all world order is described! But it is best of all to think about it after long meditation, purging your mind of busy thoughts…

To be serious, Lao Tzu said some other things, for example, here: ‘Walking wins against cold; rest wins against heat.’ ‘Tranquility creates an order in the world’. It is true, it needs to be accepted, then go further.

But what further was there? Perhaps, the beginning of the war in Iraq. No, before the war there was a preparation. I remember how everywhere it was said that Saddam and his allies from Al-Qaeda were guilty of 9/11, that they killed thousands of innocent people, and now they were preparing for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, as they prepared to launch a war with weapons of mass destruction.

People argued about those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction anywhere and everywhere – at gas stations, in snackbars, in supermarkets, and even us at the Garage.

Then there was that well-known performance of Colin Powell at the UN Security Council when he showed the whole world a test tube with white powder and said: