SPENCER GOLUB and DAVID HANCOCK

Helter Skelter


AND YET THE QUESTION REMAINS: Why did Hans “Hands” Geisser resign from Hemispheres at the height of his intellectual and artistic powers, sending Control—who viewed Geisser as the second coming of his elder brother Homer—into a five-year spiral of depression and prescription dug abuse?

The reasons were both psychological and philosophical. Geisser had a complete and total nervous breakdown, one which forced him to return to the Polish insane asylum where he had started his career—only this time as an inmate. The mental collapse stemmed directly from the reenactments that he staged for Control. Geisser lost his mind because as director of Control’s Filmstrip Directive, he was forced to watch thousands of agents make the same basic choices over and over again.

It didn’t matter if the scenarios were assassinations or room searches. The operatives repeated the same mistakes thousands and thousands of times. The wrong drawer was searched 56,987 times, the enemy agent was able to stab his interrogator with the pencil left on the desk 4,578 times, the air conditioner did not get searched 95,678 times, leading to the same explosion, the same loss of life, the same traps sprung and the same betrayals and counter-betrayals.

Watching people, many different people, from many different backgrounds, make the same basic choices had an ill effect on Geisser.

Geisser began to question his basic beliefs about free will and the power of science. He began to question the popularly held belief that humanity was able to think itself out of any dilemma. As a student in Warsaw, he’d read smuggled, illegal copies of Ayn Rand books, and he modeled his life after the characters in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. However, now that he was able to watch people in a controlled, experimental environment, he began to see humans as simple machines, not unlike the switches in railroad yards, moving freight from one destination to another.

Geisser’s views on the subject of the human condition went beyond the usual cynical, atheistic human-as-worker-ant philosophy. He had an intense religious faith, given to him by his grandmother, who had survived the pogroms and camps, and who still held that mankind had a divine purpose and had free-will and choice as to whether they decided to move their culture forward or to kill off most of the planet. Geisser believed that a woman who had experienced such things and still believed in divine purpose and order could only be 1) insane or 2) in touch with a divinity.

Geisser was a smart man; his IQ noted in his Memory-banked Hemispheres file is recorded as 178. To overcome the sudden incongruity between what he saw and what he believed, he attempted to come up with a theory that reconciled the two views. In a way, he was not unlike Einstein, trying to demonstrate that space and time are relative to each other. Geisser’s paper, A Relative Link Between Will and Destiny, was published by a small press in Prague. It sold three copies, one to a public library in Akron, Ohio, where a nearsighted librarian mistook the title for Cooking the Armenian Way. What is significant about A Relative Link is that it clearly hints at the line of thought that would eventually result in his great meditation on the full philosophical implications of espionage, The Journal of Metaphysical Tradecraft, for it was not Control’s brother Homer who wrote The Journal but rather Geisser who had replaced Homer in Control’s mind.

Granted, A Relative Link is the product of a diseased mind. In the treatise, Geisser rambles. In comparing free agency and fate, Geisser goes into obscure and obscurantist theories about Greek tragedy and conducts fantasy interviews with a boy in the Tau-Gho province of China who works an abacus with his feet as well as with a pair of separated conjoined twins in Alaska who smell colors. The pamphlet unintentionally documents the sad journey of a man sinking into depression and despair.

Geisser theorized that at the core of all philosophy, all science, all art consisted of only five basic questions. These five basic questions [taken from A Relative Link Between Will and Destiny] were:

--Who made the pie?

--How many hats does The Barber own?

--May I have another slice of pie?

--Is the liver human?

--Which street is more narrow?

Geisser writes:

On the surface, these questions may seem to be mundane, but they actually follow a basic Aristotelian “Severing” Principle [ΣλωψμκΩβγ Σμγξν ΧφυΦ ΘψωφλκΨΨ], which is the question of the “other impacted reversal” [ΣωψμκΩβγ Κμγξν Δφυ ΓψωφλκΨ] as a “divine tautology” [ΔΩβγ]. True, my Greek has been hazy since grade school, and these theorems are mentioned by A as asides, but the infinite possibilities of a Q like “which street is more narrow?” begin to resonate in these streetlights, given the measurements and the multiple meanings of “narrow.” Does not this metaphysical sleight-of-hand [Σωψμκ] implicate a more broadly imagined universe? Does not the lack of a specific size or shape shed some light on these essential questions:

--Who made the pie?

--How many hats does The Barber own?

--May I have another slice of pie?

--Is the liver human?

--Which street is more narrow?

According to Geisser, reality (and our interaction with it) was basically nothing more than being faced with one of these five questions and then answering the questions with a single answer. This final answer (which took Geisser thirty-five years to discover) is scratched into the wall of cell number 54 at the Wroclaw Institution for the Criminally Insane (where, as I have mentioned, the poor man was incarcerated during the latter part of his life, having once been a Director there). That answer is:

--Depends on the bus schedule.

Geisser, incidentally, also collected aphorisms. These were also scratched into the wall of his cell, sections of which are on exhibit at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland:

--THERE ARE NO WRONG ANSWERS,
   ONLY INCORRECT QUESTIONS
   [Einstein]

--THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS,
   ONLY STUPID PEOPLE
   [Control]

--YES, THERE ARE STUPID QUESTIONS.
   IS THIS ONE OF THEM?
   [Disney]

--FLOUR MILLS CAN’T RUN ON PANCAKES
   [Stalin]

To Geisser’s way of thinking, Control proved to be as megalomaniacal as his former (and estranged) research partner Koswalski, although clearly not insane like Manson. The inciting incident for the breakup stemmed from Control’s secret offer to Koswalski in Wroclaw to set up a Hemispheres-sponsored facility in Nebraska, where subjects who had been permanently damaged by drug experiments carried out under the auspices of The Wonka Protocol could be locked away and used for the doctor’s continued research on his version of the Psychological Reenactment and Memory Replacement Procedure. An anonymous source, believed to be inside Hemispheres, leaked the contents of Control’s letter to Koswalski to his former partner Geisser, causing Geisser to part ways with Control and to swear off partnering altogether.

Prometheanism, Geisser thought, had gotten the better of more than one man, but he continued to believe that the positive legacy of Prometheanism for science had not yet been fully or properly realized. To Geisser, Prometheus was the first case of someone who had not so much overcome special needs but had realized the potential of his special needs, or limitations, as a form of overcoming. This is why Prometheus sided with Man against the Gods, with the limitation of mortality as opposed to the limitlessness of immortality. Without seeking to build false hope, Geisser believed that Man has the potential to overcome without needing to be reengineered as a Nietzschean Overman or anatomized and used for parts by a Mengele or a Koswalski, not that the latter ever went that far. Koswalski was not a monster, just a misguided egoist. He did not dissect bodies, only minds, but always with the belief that he could put them back together in better shape than they were before. He believed that he could make the Indigestible digestible, and, allowing for the unfortunate choice of a cannibalistic metaphor that recalled the ritualistic sparagmos and ophomagia of Greek myth,[1] Koswalski thought he was performing a service to mankind. There is a good reason, though, why Euripides’ play The Bacchae, in which this ritual is most viscerally enacted, is called a tragedy, and not, say, an experiment in the science of art-making, let alone in the art of making science.

After leaving Hemispheres, which had paid his way from Poland and paid for his daily maintenance in the States, Geisser needed to find a new place to live. Given his scientific interest in reenactment, it is not surprising that Geisser was attracted to towns and cities in the United States that contained double letters in their names. At first, the extreme separation anxiety he experienced after departing Hemispheres caused Geisser to consider moving to the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, which aside from its vaguely Polish and fully Native American-sounding name, has the unique distinction of repeating the letter “o” after every other letter. Geisser read in the brochure bearing the appealingly “raw” heading “Naturally Good” that he received from the town’s Chamber of Commerce that Oconomowoc, “The City of Lakes,” is nestled in the rolling, lake country of northwest Waukesha County between the towns of Jefferson and Watertown in the west and Wales and Waukesha in the east. Oconomowoc boasts a high quality of life—safe streets, excellent schools, high-level health care (much appreciated by a doctor), an historic downtown area and “Wisconsin’s largest master-planned development.”[2] This last bit persuaded Geisser to move to Corvallis instead. He had had enough of master plans and master planners.

It appeared to Geisser that Mengele really was everywhere, even drowning repeatedly in one after the other of Waukesha County’s many lakes. Hopefully, there would be less of him in Corvallis, or else that he would drown in the Pacific Ocean once and for all and leave the world in peace. The problem was, to paraphrase the hair replacement advertisement that Geisser viewed repeatedly on the television sets in the countless motel rooms that stretched from Oconomowoc to Corvallis, Geisser had not only co-invented the Mengele Psychological Reeanactment and Memory Replacement Procedure (as it was now known), he was one of its first two subjects. Only it was not Geisser’s hair that had been replaced, but his head. His brain had not been fully “cooked,” but he could hardly claim that it was still “raw.” The first sacrifice that Prometheus made was his innocence.

It is, of course, man’s lot not to be able to see the future, not to know which of two conjoined or forked paths to choose at any given juncture in space and time. Death to the left, life to the right—that had been Mengele’s method at Auschwitz, executed repeatedly by a casual wave of the hand that separated parents from their children and one twin from another. This was a perverse premonition of Claude Levi-Strauss’ 1964 anthropological tome Le Cru Et Le Cuit, with not the cooking of food but the cooker mediating between nature and society, and especially life and death, and the raw product and the human consumer being translated into naked humanity in the first place and the megalomaniacal “scientist” in the second. Levi-Strauss did not necessarily have Mengele in mind when he spoke of how poison exists in the natural or raw state (derived from herbs or plants) but is used to effect a cultural act of cooking, but looking backwards like Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, he saw how such poison could produce an “isomorphic coincidence between nature and culture” that breaks down the essential distinction between the two categories. Mengele failed at all of his scientific experiments but succeeded in manufacturing an amoral byproduct, the indistinguishability of life and death. He created a zombie morality, of the sort that science fiction and horror films continued to replay long after his death.

Twinning is naturally all about bifurcation, although, on the surface, not about the necessity of choice or rather about the necessity for arbitrary choice—the real life fairy tale of the favored twin, the one who catches the eye of the mad doctor and is sacrificed, bled to death in the name of science. This was a far cry, even in spirit let alone practice, from Geisser’s “The Science of Art-Making and the Art of Making Science,” the lecture that The Daughters of Poland heard without understanding in Corvallis, which is, as has been noted, where the good doctor ended up. Although, Geisser had ended up far afield, he had not given up on his field, namely his research into the criminal mind via the use of the sort of reenactment scenarios he first co-developed with Koswalski in the Prometheus Project, prior to the advent of The Oz Protocol and the two doctors’ parting of ways.

I hold Geisser no grudge. In fact, I owe the man a tremendous debt of gratitude for saving the Hunters from their certain execution by the real Charles Manson. Geisser had suspected all along that his Memory Replacement experiments were being tampered with by some unknown party, which later turned out to be The Shadow Farm. Shadow Farmers had gotten into Geisser’s underground laboratory and placed a virus in the software of the main psychic projection computer. This caused a bifurcation in the reenactments, so that all the fictional characters invented by Geisser and Control for the therapy were doubled in the real world by actual killers. Although Control had actually invented Charles Manson and his family one morning while eating breakfast in “Babylon,” as soon as the Shadow Farmers released their bifurcation bug, a real Charles Manson, complete with family, appeared in the California desert.

To be fair to Geisser, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. The idea was a simple one, and appealing to Geisser: use the Psychological Reenactment and Memory Replacement Procedure to help victims of the Holocaust heal by placing them into psychological reenactments that created alternative memories to those of their actual lives in the death camps. Geisser did not like to see people suffer, and he saw no harm in what he was doing. Emboldened by the results of the therapy on a group of octogenarians living at a Jewish retirement home in Brooklyn, Control decided to push the therapy one step further and use it on his own agents who were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. What Geisser started to object to was how, in cases of Hemispheres operatives, pleasant memories were actually being replaced by negative ones as a way to explain certain inconsistencies between what the agents had seen in their lives and what they believed was true. Fictional traumas were also used as evidence of deaths that never really took place, as in the case of the Hunters who were subjected to the procedure without their consent. Details about Walter Baker Hunter’s kidnapping--and Claudia’s alleged death--were implanted in Diane and Wesley Hunter’s subconscious minds, but it wasn’t until the couple started to question the circumstances of their children’s disappearance that Control forced Geisser to implement a more rigorous Psychological Reenactment protocol called “The Family.”

“The Family” referred both to Charles Manson’s “family” and to the “family” he killed, namely Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the others visiting the Tate-Polanski household at the time. At first the Manson attacks were to be simply a theatrical production in a Hemispheres back lot. The Hunters were drugged and--under the influence of those drugs--forced to watch their children being brutally murdered by Manson’s family (played by Control’s experimentally mutated Bigheads). Wesley and Diane woke up believing that the slaughter had been how Claudia and Walter had died, the idea being that when faced with two painful incidents, the human mind remembers the more traumatic one, at the expense of the lesser twin memory. There was an unexpected, secondary effect that resulted from implementing The Family. The Bigheads, having gone through the horrific bonding experience of a mass murder, became a surrogate family unit of their own, which Control (in the person or rather the image of Manson) was able to use to his advantage. The fact that Wesley Hunter participated in the experiment as the test subject and not as part of The Family explains why he (as Mishka the Bear) always felt like an outsider to the fraternity of the Bigheads.

Although obviously frightening to the layman, Geisser believed at first that The Family was actually a very effective method for healing and reconciliation. Things went well for a time, with Control giving Geisser the means to continue research on the uses and limits of Prometheanism, and with Geisser concocting tests, procedures and theme nights that served Control’s agenda. Geisser was interested in studying the sources of criminal behavior via the scenic reenactment of actual crimes of a provocatively heinous variety. The majority of his time was devoted to studying the actual “Family” murders of the American actress Sharon Tate and her house guests, including a Hollywood hair stylist, the Folger coffee heiress and the heriress’ Polish lover, Wojiech Frykowski. They also murdered a young man ironically named “Parent,” who saw them approaching the house, along with Leno and Rosemary Labianca on the following night. The Family committed these murders under the direction of Charles Manson and under the influence of drugs. Manson’s theory of “Helter Skelter” derived from the song of the same name on The Beatles’ “White Album,” which Manson believed had prophesied the ultimate race war. The Nazi overtones were clear, especially once one substitutes an “I” for the first of the doubled “E”s and switches the position of the “L” and the “T” in “Helter” to form “Hitler.” This is a logical process for a paranoid delusional mind to effect. Manson was a foster home reject as a teenager, who ended up in a reform school in Terre Haute, Indiana, before running away to live on the streets and thereafter in Federal Prison for one-half (17 years) of his pre-Helter Skelter life.

Geisser’s interest in this case stemmed from his observation, while he was still working in Poland, of one of his patients’ obsession with it. Little Halina Polanski, a child psychic who enjoyed smothering infants in their sleep (because they dreamed in forbidden mathematical code), kept replaying the murders in her mind, even though they had occurred before she was even born. Halina’s mother believed that her daughter had the Promethean gift of prophecy, but clearly there was something of Prometheus’ brother Epimethus’ power to somehow predict the past in her as well. Much as Honoratus Koswalski (another one of The Daughters of Poland) believed that she was descended from Polish royalty, Halina Polanski was convinced that she was somehow related to and possibly even immediately descended from Sharon Tate’s husband, filmmaker Roman Polanski. Halina secretly believed that she was the unborn fetus that Sharon Tate was carrying inside her at the time of her murder. Of course, this was The Oz Drug talking.

The twice-exiled Polanski’s story was told in thinly veiled fashion in the film Get Larry Hitler, which Halina watched with the other girls (“Daughters”) on board the bus called “The Red H.” Being twice exiled is, of course, another form of reenactment. In Halina’s scenario, a Hemispheres assassin named Heavy Water is the Manson family’s primary executioner, and not Charles “Tex” Watson, as the media had so widely reported. He, that is Heavy Water, was doing his master’s bidding, as were all of the girls who had been assembled for the bus tour of America and whose names had morphed into Ivanka Watson, Honoratus Krenwinkle, Lula van Houten, and Nastya “Squeaky” Fromme.

Geisser realized what was happening when he noticed odd similarities between the murders described in the newspaper and his own reenactments. When he told Control about the situation that was developing, the Old Man laughed and said “so what?” Obviously, Control had been planning for the real-world executions of The Family all along, as well as for the mind and life manipulation of his own agents. Thankfully, Geisser was able to prevent the Hunters from accepting an invitation to a dinner party at the house of Sharon Tate (who was quite possibly a bifurcation of the Hunters’ daughter Claudia—first in the reenactment and then, via the bifurcation bug, in real life).

Then the epiphany hit him. Geisser found himself staring at a dumpster at the back of a Dairy Queen in Eureka, Kansas. Suddenly he heard the voice of a little girl speaking to him inside his head. He wrote the following phrase on the dumpster with chalk:

HELTER SKELTER

And with those 13 letters, The Journal of Metaphysical Tradecraft had begun.

Geisser got in his car and drove straight from Kansas to Southern California in the hope of stopping the tragedy that was already unfolding. Unfortunately, The Shadow Farm had replaced the maps in his car’s glove box, and Geisser, who was great in a lab but a terrible driver, ended up driving into the hills of Mexico, presumably lost without a clue as to where he was going. His body was found high up in the hills, lying face down on the edge of a cliff, his hands outstretched in front of him, gripping one of my sister’s handkerchiefs, like he was trying to hitch a ride on the first star to the left, one that would guide him to the Tate house—straight on till morning.



HOW DO YOU EVER REALLY KNOW where you are, though? Do roadmaps and road signs, fast food joints and service or radio stations give you an accurate accounting? Before leaving Poland, one of the tour leaders sat the girls from the Polskaya Dryzhba school down in front of a map of Poland and drew a triangle that stretched from Wroclaw to Warsaw to Krakow. She then superimposed a triangle of exactly the same dimensions on a map of Poland’s sister state, Ohio. The girls gasped in amazement to see how neatly “Wroclaw” became “Rockland,” “Krakow” became “Crackston” and “Warsaw” “Warsaw.” This wonder carried within it a question: If you could so easily rename (“Rockland” for “Wroclaw”) and repeat (“Warsaw” for “Warsaw”), how could you ever really know how far you have traveled and where you really are in space and time? And if such spatiotemporal markers tell you that how far you’ve come and where you are now are in question, what can you really know about where you are going?

Sharon Tate asked herself this same question as she prepared for dinner with friends on a muggy Los Angeles night at the lovely Cielo Drive home she shared with her husband and the father of her unborn child, Roman Polanski. Just to clarify before going on to who knows where, Roman Polanski was not the name of Sharon Tate’s unborn child, but of her husband and of her unborn child’s father. In her globetrotting husband’s absence and with the natural anxieties that attend the eighth or penultimate month of pregnancy in tow, Sharon’s musings grew dark: “Cielo Drive,” she thought as she applied her rouge in her make-up mirror. “By living in this private paradise with the man of my dreams, am I perhaps too close to heaven, maybe even driving myself toward heaven as my residential address suggests?”

Her friends were all cultured and good-looking. Even the weather was cooler up there, to answer the question that is so often addressed to tall people and to movie stars. Up there was in the canyons above Beverly Hills, which is a strange way of describing such Olympian Heights. How can a canyon be so high and still be such a long way down? Sharon was thinking about nature that night, its heights and depths—its topography. As a 26-year-old actress who had largely made her reputation on the size of her bust and the allure of her overall figure, such thinking came naturally to her.

“We’re gonna be in the beautiful hills of Beverly with a pool and a spice garden—the whole schmeer,” the putative father of Rosemary’s baby tells his wife.

Sharon’s company dressed for dinner. Abigail Folger brought the best coffee, along with her boyfriend and Polanski’s old-country friend Woytek Frykowski. Internationally known stylist and Sharon’s former beau Jay Sebring, who at one time did Sharon, now did Sharon’s hair, festooning it with stars for this occasion, making her hair appear, by relation, to be the firmament. About halfway through Polanski’s film, Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary suddenly appears with her hair cut short and announces, “I’ve been to Vidal Sassoon.” Her husband views this as being something of a betrayal, as it would be if Sharon Tate told Polanski, “I’ve been to Jay Sebring.” You can’t go back, you can never go back. Clothes make the man, but his wife’s shorn locks unmake him, especially when the person doing the shearing is his wife’s former lover. Roman later said that Sebring, whose marriage proposal Sharon had turned down sometime before, considered the Polanskis to be his surrogate family. Anticipating the Family who would visit him and Sharon on the night her hair radiated in the stars’ dying light, Sebring had already made the first cut.

There would be a lot of things drawn on walls that were smeared with blood that night by freaks of nature, including a Tree of Blood that substituted for a real family tree. For instance, who is that lost boy wandering down Ceilo drive? He’s covered in blood and singing Que Sera Sera to himself. The cops who picked the boy up think he may be the son of Squeaky Fromme who left him at the murder scene because she wanted him to have a better life. By some accounts, the boy is a child that Manson kidnapped back East and tried to ransom. Manson never got any money for the kid and was going to kill him, but Squeaky felt sorry for the boy and secretly released him as all the chaos was going on. (Because the boy was a minor, none of the official reports of the Manson Family murders mention him.) A day after the murder, a fat man and a thin woman arrive at the temporary foster home where the boy is staying. They promise the boy a new name, plenty of trips to Dairy Queen and a proper orphanage in Ohio.


[1] The tearing to pieces and physical consumption of the Man-God Dionysus.

[2] See http://www.oconomowocusa.com



Spencer Golub

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Spencer Golub is professor of theatre arts, performance studies, comparative literature, and Slavic languages at Brown University. His books include the semi-fictional film memoir Infinity (Stage) and the Callaway Prize-winning The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (University of Iowa). He is currently completing a book on Wittgenstein, anxiety and performance behavior.

David Hancock

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David Hancock has received two OBIE awards for playwriting (The Convention of Cartography and The Race of the Ark Tattoo). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Creative Capital grant, The CalArts/Alpert Award in Theatre, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. David’s recent fiction can be found in Permafrost, Interim, Wild Violet,The Massachusetts Review, Ping Pong, and Amarillo Bay.





More of Golub and Hancock’s co-authored work is forthcoming or published in Petrichor Machine, Danse Macabre, Martian Lit, Bluestem, West Wind Review, Schlock Magazine, The Delinquent, Otis Nebula and scissors and spackle.
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