By Ed Staskus

   I hadn’t seen my bootleg niece for three or four years. When she unexpectedly showed up the first week of Lent, I thought we might get together. She had always been a hard girl to get close to, opinionated and stubborn. But I thought I would try to catch up to what she had been doing. When two weeks went by, and it still hadn’t happened, I stopped in to see my sister, where Silvija was staying in her old bedroom. But it still didn’t happen. She relayed a message down to me that she had a touch of COVID that day but would see me in a day-or-two.

   “She says she’s had COVID several times,” my sister said. “Both times it lasted for months. She says she’s hugely sensitive to it and that she can tell when anybody else has it.”

   “That’s unusual,” I said. “How can she tell?”

   “She senses it.”

   Silvy’s senses were on high alert. She had her own key so she could come and go as she pleased, even though she hardly went anywhere. She was careful as could be. She spent most of her time on the second floor in a room by herself with a laptop. She didn’t like anybody knocking. She said she was studying for her next computer programming job interview. She subscribed to Netflix to fill the rest of the time.

   After a day-or-two went by and I hadn’t seen her I thought it might be in a week or-two. After a week-or two I thought it might be in the unforeseeable future.

  “How long is Silvy staying in town?” I asked my sister.

   “I don’t know but I hope she leaves soon. She is creeping me out,” she said.

   “That is creepy, your light was on in your room even though I had turned it off, and I kept hearing strange noises. Someone else somehow had to have been in the house. It looked like some objects were moved as well. I feel super creeped out if it wasn’t you. I’ve been keeping the front and back door looked with the deadbolt when I’m home.  I always lock the doors. Even taking Vilka out to go potty in the backyard I lock the door behind me.”

   Vilka was Silvy’s’s dog. The dog was a Tamaskan. She got her from a breeder eight years earlier when the dog was 10 weeks old. Her name in Lithuanian means wolf. She was big and friendly enough but scared of her own shadow. 

   “I had an issue with stalking and people breaking and entering my apartment ever since I did that military project. I assumed it was staff coming in unannounced and made complaints to management and even filed a police report. They did nothing. I caught maintenance coming in once. There was no maintenance there. It is a form of harassment and against the law. Maybe we should get some hidden cameras.”

   “She seems to be in the weeds. How did she decide to visit you?” I asked.

   “I don’t know, she just showed up. She doesn’t have an apartment, or a job, so I don’t know what to do with her.”

   “What about Algis?”

   Al was my sister’s ex-husband. He had been a policeman in Lithuania, a roofer when they got married, and was now a long-haul trucker. He worked and lived in his 18-wheeler. He had tried to convince his daughter to share an apartment with him in Texas, so he would have somewhere to stay for a few days every month, where he could wash his clothes, sleep in his own bed, and plug into some R & R, but she said no.

   “They can’t be in the same room for long before they start screaming at each other,” my sister said.

   Silvy was born in Alytus, Lithuania in the early 1990s to my brother-in-law Al and his then wife Asta. When they divorced Al met my sister on a flight from Europe to the United States. She was a travel agent and was going home to Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Al was on his way to New Jersey where his estranged wife had emigrated. He couldn’t get back together with her but got together with my sister. While they were married Al, Silvy, and my sister lived in Lakewood, Ohio, on a quiet tree-lined street in an old-school neighborhood. When she was a teenager, she attended Lakewood High School.

   “I don’t feel safe. On top of the non-stop cyber-attacks, I have been living in hell for years from abuse, stalking, harassment, and sabotage. It has been a constant nightmare. It has destroyed my work, my finances, and so many other aspects of my life. I have spent $15,000 on new electronics in three years because of people installing malware and viruses on my devices and remotely controlling my computers and phones. I have been given wrong directions from my GPS directing me straight into oncoming traffic on a one- way street.”

   While she was in high school, she played rugby, playing scrum-half and fly-half. She was fast and quick on the pitch. Her last year the team won all their regular season games. They scrimmaged against both Kent State and Ashland University. They beat them both. They placed second at the Midwest Rugby Tournament and qualified for the Nationals, where they were ranked second in the nation.

   Silvy hurt her knee during the Midwest Rugby Tournament. She dragged herself off the pitch. She was still limping after a trainer wrapped her knee but insisted on going back into the game. She could hardly walk much less run, but she was worked up about winning.

   “She was a difficult friend, hard to get along with,” Courtney her next-door neighbor and rugby teammate said. “She was nosy and jealous.”

   Silvy went to summer camp on Wasaga Beach in Canada with my niece Katie, who was more-or-less her cousin, who lived right around the corner and who went to the same high school, every summer for seven years. “She couldn’t get along with her,” my sister said. “She wouldn’t be friends with Katie’s friends and finally didn’t even want to be in the same cabin as her.”

   She went to Miami University, majoring in psychology and zoology. While there she collaborated on the study “Biodirectional Effects of Positive Affect, Warmth, and Interactions between Mothers With and Without Symptoms of Depression and Their Toddlers” published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies. She found a boyfriend, Dean, with whom she connected and with whom she traveled far and wide to raves and electronic dance music festivals. The lights were bright and the exclamation marks emphatic. She danced up a storm. In the meantime, she went back to school, earning a third degree in computer science. 

   “People corrupted my computer and prevented me from being able to interview by changing settings or preventing me from downloading a compatible browser. They have installed malformed certificates so the browser would not connect to the internet. All sorts of stuff like that for years. Non-stop abuse and attacks. Every single day I’m dealing with these things. I already had to return my new laptop. My phone currently has erratic behavior.”

   After she got done with her binary studies she worked as a software engineer for a year in Piscataway, New Jersey, five months in Windsor, Connecticut, and six months in Hartford, Connecticut, before landing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she worked for about a year. By the time she came back to Lakewood she hadn’t been working for some six months. She was living on her credit cards and living out of her car. Dean her one-time boyfriend had long since disconnected. The raves were behind her. She still had her dog, but she was a fish out of water.

   “It has all caused so much depression. I have wanted to kill myself several times in the last three years because of all the abuse. Every time I made a police report or filed a report to the FBI Cybercrimes Division nothing came of it. I have lost over $150,000.00 from all of this in wage losses, property damage, job loss, and having to use credit cards to get by.”

   She was more than $30,000.00 in the hole with her credit cards and more than $60,000.00 in the hole with her student loans.

   “My browser constantly gives the wrong info. When I am studying or working my code compilation returns incorrect results regularly. The people responsible deserve to rot in jail or die. Not die, but still. Just finished meditating and I feel way less stressed. I guess the silver lining is that I am aware of what is happening to many other people and have experience with these kinds of situations. Perhaps at some point that will give me the power to create change in a corrupt system.”

   “Is she still a vegan?” I asked my sister.

   Silvy had gone emphatically vegan while at Miami University, losing weight and losing arguments about the viability of eating animal protein, although a glow of virtue lit up her face whenever veganism and animal rights came up in talk around campus.

   “No, she cooks pork chops for Vilka and herself every morning.”

   My brother invited Silvy to dinner at his house, but it didn’t come to anything.

   “I would love to, but I might get an urge to assault Katie for the things she has done in the metaverse, so I better pass this time. I don’t feel like entertaining shitty actors or scripted conversations. I refuse to be a victim for the rest of my life. I am not a project. Super appreciate you thinking about me, though.”

   One day my sister was driving down her street when she saw a flock of fire trucks in front of her house. One of the smoke detectors had started beeping and Silvy had called the Lakewood Fire Department saying that the house was burning down. When my sister dashed up the driveway to find out what was happening, the firemen told her nothing was happening.  

   “Your smoke detectors are on the old side. One of them was signaling that it needed to be replaced. I suggest you replace all of them.”

   “I don’t get why fire fighters say there is no smoke when there is. I smelled smoke and felt dizzy and couldn’t think. I checked the oven, stove, the outlets, but could not find the source so I called 911. What did I do wrong here? I have had the same issues at other places I have lived at. In Connecticut the fire fighters told me there was nothing there, too, when I had symptoms of CO poisoning and no alarm went off. It’s like a psych game. It is gas lighting the individual to not feel confident in their experience of reality. I don’t need smoke detectors. I don’t need people telling me I’m crazy or schizophrenic when that is not the case. I need people to stop gas lighting me.”

   The day came when Silvy had to go, one way or another. She wasn’t paying her share of anything and was being bossy and disruptive. The techno was out of whack. When she left, she left her dog behind, although she took the dog’s bed with her.

   “I left her with someone I thought would look out for her best interests since I have no way to take care of her with nonstop cyber-attacks and nanorobotics controlling me and throwing programmed errors at me hundreds of times a day. I’m sorry for adding a burden to you. I have tried everything I could think of for three years to escape being targeted. I’ve moved states four times, switched jobs four times, tried to lay low and see if it would stop. I tried resisting and suffered a brain injury. I don’t know what else to tell you. I did everything I could think of, and it wasn’t good enough. I’m completely sane and aware. I’m not depressed. I simply refuse to be controlled by a corrupt system and insane people willing to do anything for a few bucks. If my life is not my own, it is no one’s.”

   My sister already had a cat and two dogs. She called Silvy immediately and insisted she come back and pick up her dog. “I can’t have another dog in the house, much less an 80-pound dog,” she said. By the time she came back my sister had changed the locks and wouldn’t let her inside the house. She brought the dog to the side door. 

   “Go,” she said, pointing in all directions.

   Silvy kicked up a fuss in the driveway but was gone soon enough when she realized nobody was watching listening paying attention. It was Easter Saturday. The next day was resurrection day. “I want people to listen to me, believe me, and help me solve the issues and attacks I’m experiencing so I can keep my job and be able to afford a home for Vilka and me. She deserves better, but I don’t have a way of providing better.”

   A week after she left Lakewood, I heard she made it to San Diego and was boarding in an Airbnb with access to a kitchen and a backyard. Vilka was glad to be out of the car, 2,500 miles later, even if it had been wagon’s ho. Silvy’s father was paying the going rate, although she was fluffing her own pillows. She had gotten a sizable tax return and was bringing home double pack pork chops. There were few weeds in the neighborhood despite the abundant sunshine. 

   Ohio has more than its fair share of noxious weeds, given its damp midwestern climate, including giant hogweed, purple loosestrife, and mile-a-minute weed. Southern California dreaming is more like the home of invasive weeds, but since it is manicured buffed polished, unless they are stubborn, they don’t usually stand much of a chance.

   The last word I got about the gone girl was from Katie on Mother’s Day, who said she saw her on a social media site attending a yippie yi yay modern music fest out in the call of the west. She wasn’t from around those parts, but she was staking her claim and grooving to her own beat.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”