By Ed Staskus
I hadn’t seen Hildy for three or four years. She had become nomadic after graduating from college. 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, being opinionated and stubborn with a zany streak to boot. 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 her stepmother, where Hildy was staying in her old bedroom. But it still didn’t happen. She sent a text that she had come down with a touch of Covid-19 but would see me in a day-or-two.
“She says she’s had a deadly strain of Covid-19 a couple of times,” her stepmother said. “Both times it lasted for months. She says she’s hugely sensitive to it, that she keeps getting it for a few days or a week, and that she can tell when anybody else has it.”
“That’s unusual,” I said. “How can she tell?”
“She smells and senses it. At least, that’s what she said.”
She was named Hildegard after her grandmother. She hated the name and usually refused to answer to it. I called her Hildy as a workaround. She tolerated the diminutive like a teenager tolerates advice.
Hildy’s senses were on high alert. She had her own house key so she could come and go as she pleased, although she hardly went anywhere. She was careful as could be. She spent most of her time in her room by herself with a twosome of laptops. She didn’t like anybody knocking on the bedroom door. She said she was boning up for her next computer programming job interview. She subscribed to Netflix to fill in the rest of the time. She watched sci-fi movies.
After a day-or-two went by and I hadn’t seen her I thought it might happen in a week or-two. Maybe she was still under the weather. After a week-or two I thought it might be sometime in the unforeseeable6 future.
“How long is Hildy staying in town?” I asked her stepmother.
“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,” Hildy said. “Someone else somehow had to have been in the house. It looked like some objects were moved as well. I feel super spooked 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 Emil out to go potty in the backyard, I lock the door behind me.”
Emil was Hildy’s dog. It was a Tamaskan. She got him from a breeder eight years earlier when the dog was ten weeks old. His name is associated with ambition and a drive to surpass others. The dog was plenty big enough to live up to his name but was scared of his own shadow. He was like a jittery fawn. He had no daring of any kind.
“I had an issue with stalking and people breaking and entering my apartment ever since I did that military project after college,” Hildy said. “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. It is a form of harassment and against the law. Maybe we should get some hidden cameras.”
“She seems halfway in the weeds,” I said. “How is it she decided to visit you?” I knew there was some bad blood between them. There had even been real blood once.
“I don’t know, she just showed up. Believe me, I didn’t invite her. She doesn’t have an apartment, or a job right now, so I don’t know what to do with her.”
“What about Joe?”
Joe was her ex-husband. He had been a policeman in the Baltics, a roofer in New Jersey 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 Hildy said no.
“They can’t be in the same room together for long before they start screaming at each other.”
Hildy was born in Lithuania in the early 1990s to Joe and his then wife Birute. When they divorced Joe met his new wife-to-be on a flight from Europe to the United States. She was a travel agent and was going home. Joe was on his way to New York City where his estranged wife had landed. He couldn’t get back together with her but got together with his new friend. After they were married they lived in Lakewood, just west of Cleveland, on a quiet tree-lined street in an old-school neighborhood. When she was a teenager, Hildy attended Lakewood High School.
“I don’t feel safe anymore,” she said. “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 one-way streets.”
When she was in high school she played rugby, playing the scrum half and fly half positions. She was fast and quick on the pitch. Her last year on the team they won all their regular season games. They scrimmaged against both Kent State University and Ashland University. They beat them both. They placed second at the Midwest Rugby Tournament and qualified for the Nationals. They were ranked second in the country.
Hildy 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 had grit, if nothing else.
“She had willpower, but she was a difficult friend, hard to get along with,” Tabitha her next-door neighbor and rugby teammate said. “She was nosy and jealous.”
Hildy went to a summer camp on the Georgian Bay in Canada with her cousin Sadie, who lived around the corner and who went to the same high school, every summer for five years. “She couldn’t get along with her,” her stepmother said. “She wouldn’t be friends with Sadie’s friends and finally didn’t even want to be in the same cabin as her.”
She went to Miami University, majoring in psychology. 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, Sean, with whom she connected and with whom she traveled far and wide to raves and techno festivals. The lights were bright and the exclamation marks emphatic. The music was very loud. She danced up a storm. In the meantime, she went back to school, earning a 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,” she said. “They have installed malformed certificates so my 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 studies she worked as a software engineer for a year in New Jersey, five months in Connecticut, and six months in Delaware, before landing in Colorado, where she worked for about a year. By the time she came back to Lakewood she hadn’t been working for six months. She was living on her credit cards and living out of her car. Sean, her one-time boyfriend, had long since disconnected. She still had her dog, but she was a fish running out of fresh water.
“It has all caused so much depression,” she said. “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. The holes were getting deeper by the month.
“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 something. 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 her stepmother.
Hildy had gone vegan while at Miami University, losing weight and waging battles about the ethics and viability of eating animal protein. A glow of virtue lit up her face whenever veganism and animal rights came up in dialog around the campus.
“No, she now cooks pork chops for Emil and herself every morning.”
Her uncle invited Hildy to dinner at his house, but Hildy turned down the invitation. “I would love to, but I might get an urge to assault Sadie 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 her stepmother was driving up her street when she saw fire trucks in front of her house. One of the smoke detectors had started beeping and Hildy had called the Lakewood Fire Department, declaring that the house was burning down. When her stepmother 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,” Hildy said. “I smelled smoke and felt dizzy and couldn’t think. I checked the oven, the 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 although no alarm went off. It’s like a psych game. It is gaslighting 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 gaslighting me.”
The day came when Hildy had to go, one way or another. She wasn’t paying her share of anything, food or living expenses, and was being bossy and noisy. She was playing techno music loud enough to annoy the neighbors. When she left, she left by herself, leaving Emil behind.
“I left him with someone I thought would look out for his best interests since I have no way to take care of him with nonstop cyber-attacks and nanorobotics controlling me and throwing programmed errors at me hundreds of times a day,” she said. “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 but 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.”
Her stepmother already had a cat and two dogs. She called Hildy straight away 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 Hildy got back her stepmother had changed the locks and wouldn’t let her inside the house. She brought the dog to the side door.
“Go away,” she said to her step-daughter, pointing in all directions.
Hildy kicked up a fuss in the driveway but left soon enough when she realized nobody was watching or listening or paying attention. It was Easter Saturday. “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 Emil and me. He deserves better.”
I hadn’t seen Hildy even once the six weeks she was in town. A week after she left Lakewood, I heard she had popped up in San Diego and was staying in an Airbnb with a kitchen and a big backyard. Emil was happy to be out of the car, 2,500 miles later, even though it had been a non-stop wagon’s ho. Hildy’s father was making the rental for her and Emil. She chipped in by fluffing her own pillows. She had gotten a sizable tax return and was bringing home the pork chops. It was a nice neighborhood, quiet and sunny. There were few weeds despite the abundant sunshine.
Ohio has more than its fair share of noxious weeds, given its damp midwestern climate, including giant hogweed and purple loosestrife. California is more like the home of invasive weeds, but since it is spayed, manicured, and polished, unless the weeds are unusually stubborn, they don’t usually stand much of a chance.
The last word I got about Hildy was from Sadie, who said she saw the gone girl on Facebook attending a techno fest somewhere out west. It was the four-on-the-floor beat. It was the Call of the West. She wasn’t from around those parts, but she was staking her claim and grooving to her own beat, whatever the beat in her head happened to be.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 