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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 28, 2024

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Sitting at the table in the spartan visitors’ room, awaiting the unidentified woman who was coming to see him, Jake began to give up his fantasy ⏤ his hope ⏤ that it would be Ianna. The sight of him would make her ill. He was a remnant of a man ⏤ a medical doctor whose identity lay in shreds on the floor where he was housed in solitary confinement. 

> Read the previous Chronicles at the bottom of this post.

Jake could not overcome how he had betrayed his COVID patients, taking orders from up high not to treat them and instead to push the experimental, deadly vaccines on them. That shame was becoming greater than the anxiety of solitary and fear for his future. 

And he was frightened about his exchanges with Dr. Maggie, the psychiatrist who had only left him moments ago. Would Dr. Maggie try to force psychiatric drugs on him? Jake’s own intimidated public defender would go along with drugging him. With his body already locked up, the drugs would lock up his brain, mind, and soul — and it would all be over for him.  

There were plenty of female lawyers working for public defenders. The mystery visitor could be another cowardly defense lawyer — too afraid to defend “insurrectionists” like him against the mighty federal prosecutors.

“Damn,” he excoriated himself. “I can’t even remember the name of my own lawyer.” And if Ianna were about to come through the door, he couldn’t even remember her last name either — the last name of the woman he dreamed of as his soulmate. 

Then it dawned on him. After all these months in the lockup, the obvious dawned on him. It began by asking himself as a physician, “What if I had a patient with my symptoms?” He had a near memory blank for days before and after the confrontation with the police in the Capitol, except for these vivid memories of Ianna that nothing could eradicate. Suppose his patient, as he did, also had confusion about the order of events in his recent life and was also having trouble keeping track of the calendar that was usually so vivid in his head? Even some of the exhaustion and emotional instability, all of it lost in a blur surrounding his imprisonment, could be part of his syndrome.   

“I must have had a concussion,” Jake told himself. “The cops threw me to the floor in the Capitol, and I was concussed.” That’s why he had that wrenched shoulder that took months to stop aching. And it explained the lump of deformed bone he could still feel beneath the skin above the back of his ear. “It must have been a hell of crack on the head,” he murmured to himself. He wondered if they even bothered to order a brain scan; probably not.  

He remembered more, fragment on fragment. He had been taken from the jail to the prison infirmary. He had spent a blur of days there trying to regain his wits. 

So he wasn’t that crazy — they had cracked his head on the floor. Or smashed him with a baton. Or kicked him in the head. He had a physical injury to his brain and wasn’t altogether going crazy. It was an amazing relief; he wasn’t completely losing his mind. And now his thinking was becoming better, just from being outside solitary for this short time and the jolt of seeing the damn psychiatrist, and now awaiting Ianna — “Please let it be Ianna.”

Curtis, the guard who had escorted him in shackles to the visitors’ room, opened the door and slipped in as if afraid of being seen.  

“My comb, I lent you, so you could look good for her,” he whispered and smiled. “It’s contraband. We could both get in bad trouble.”

“Thank you,” Jake said, handing back the comb. Curtis had endangered himself by lending him the comb. What seemed so small was an incredible act of generosity.    

She’s here,” Curtis added. “You’ve got three hours with her. I’ll do everything I can not to interrupt.”

Curtis was gone, and a woman was standing in the doorway. She took a step in and closed the door behind herself. Jake somehow had not considered that they would be together like this, utterly alone and private, in a windowless room, with nobody to intrude on them for hours.  

Ianna was perfectly dressed in a business suit — he had never seen her that way — and yet so angelically beautiful. It made him even more ashamed of how he must look to her. 

“Oh, God, Jake,” she whispered, shocked by the sight of him. 

Jake expected her to turn around and leave. She would be better off.

“Oh, God, Jake,” Ianna repeated and came around the table and knelt on the floor beside him as he sat shackled, too weak to stand without using his hands.  

She was crying quietly, her arms around his body, her face in his chest, his shackled hands pinned down inside her hug.

Jake began to sob uncontrollably. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it — his very soul coming to the surface, a torrent of overflowing tears, gushing like a runaway street gutter cluttered with misery and debris. In all his fantasies, he had imagined nothing like these feelings. All he could do was let it run its course. 

Finally, he subsided, and Ianna, still on her knees, reached up to stroke his face and wiped away his tears with a tissue.  

To Jake, this had to mean… he could imagine no other explanation… it could not be true, but it had to mean, “She feels the same way about me.”  

Ianna stood up, like a soldier recovering her demeanor.

“We have got to get you out of here,” she said, not with pity, but with determination.

“Please, Ianna, I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Of course not, of course not,” she replied. It was her same wonderful voice he remembered but stronger. 

“How did you get permission to see me in here? I haven’t seen my kids or my brother, or anyone. My own attorney doesn’t answer my calls.”

“Let me sit down,” she said. “I have to gather myself together, Jake. I have so much to tell you. You can’t imagine.”

Ianna took a deep breath and sighed, and then looked at him with soft caring eyes. He began to return her gaze, and they both began to smile. Just being with her… he was feeling it all over again as if they had never been apart. Wordlessly, they were coming back together again. 

“Jake, I hope you don’t mind, but I told them I’m your new lawyer.”

“Did you fake an ID?” Jake asked nervously.

“Jake, I am a lawyer. All you have to do is agree, and I’m legitimately yours.”

“A lawyer? We were together two days, talking every minute….”

“Three and a half days, Jake, practically four and three whole nights, hardly sleeping at all.”

Jake shook his head, trying to fathom all this confusion inside his head, and then he remembered that it had to be the concussion.  

As if reading his mind, she said, “Jake, you’ve been through hell. Don’t worry if you get mixed up.”

“But you’re a lawyer?”

“Jake, I fell for you, out-of-my-mind; this good girl went out-of-her mind. All my fears about men came at me within the first hours we were together. A big one was how you would react to my being a lawyer, a really good lawyer. I’m still afraid to spill it all out — can you be with…can you be with…a…woman like me? 

Jake felt no words of response coming. He tried to explain, “A few minutes ago, I imagined you coming through that door like a tornado in a shaft of light. I imagined you destroying this awful place and the two of us taking off free. But the reality—it’s like…this is….”

“Yes, I am going to get you out of here. They have broken every Constitutional protection for the criminally accused — and you haven’t been formally accused of a crime. If you agree, I will walk into that court with a bill of particulars against them and a preliminary demand for damages. I have the records. The feds gave only one cause for holding you all this time without a trial date. They said they thought you might be a right-wing terrorist, and they need more time to investigate. They have no facts, no evidence at all against you for any kind of felony. They cannot do that in America. At least, it’s never been done before January 6th.”

This was not the woman he remembered. Never so strong as this. He had never been with a woman who radiated such strength and determination. He understood why she’d been afraid to let him see this other side of her.   

He tried to explain, “I thought it was my memory, a  hole in memory, that I had no idea what I was being accused of.”

“No, Jake, you’re a political prisoner. You’re being made an example of. Do you remember how we got into the Capitol building that day, that infamous January 6th?”

He shook his head.

“I found video proof, Jake. Government surveillance videos.” Ianna became more deliberate, providing exact details as if repeating a prepared presentation. “One video shows three cops from behind. They are in the Capitol building chatting with a group of us who are standing outside. You can see us through partially opened doors that the cops are holding open in order to talk with us. There is no pushing or shoving, nothing disorderly. One of the cops gets a message and taps the other two on the shoulders, and they open the double doors all the way and usher about a dozen of us into the building. The cops have their backs to the camera, and you can see our faces as we walk happily into the building and toward the camera. It’s easy to identify you and me — and you can even see we are happy to be together.” Ianna broke the narrative with a smile and then resumed more formally,

“Another video, with a timer indicating it is a minute or two later, shows our group inside the building, walking peacefully and being ushered up three steps through a set of interior doors. The camera is now behind us, so you can see the faces of two cops holding the doors open as if it’s a courtesy during a tour,” she finished ironically.

“Did my public defender have them, see them — those videos?”

“I found them on the internet. When I questioned your court-appointed attorney, he acted uninterested and told me dismissively, ‘everybody knows about them.’” 

This was all too weird for Jake. Was he delusional? Was this the Elon-12 inside his head — creating an illusion — a supernatural visitation from a woman comes to rescue him from a nightmare from which he could not awaken himself?  

Ianna seemed to read his mind again. “Jake, it’s going to be okay. It is me, the real same me, Ianna McCormick. I promise, you.” She held her hand over her heart.

Yes, that was her last name, McCormick. He loved her name, Ianna McCormick. 

“Jake, I’ve been blathering. So anxious and relieved to see you. You look ill. You’ve lost a lot of weight. You aren’t taking care of yourself. What have they been doing to you?”

He could not bear to tell her.

“Jake, I’ve been talking to other attorneys, some of the good ones. Some of their clients have been locked in solitary for months. Like a Communist country.”

He wanted to tell her, “Solitary confinement, almost every day the whole time.” He couldn’t. Instead, tears fell down his face.

She guessed, “Oh God, Jake, you’ve been in solitary this whole damned time?”

Jake nodded.

“No wonder I haven’t heard from you,” she murmured.

He could see her bottom lip was trembling. The militant expression was melting. But he didn’t want to make her cry. 

With barely stifled rage and hurt, and absolute determination, Ianna told him, “I can’t waste a minute. Not a second. This isn’t ordinary law. You’re not an ordinary prisoner. We can’t play by the usual rules because federal prosecutors no longer have any rules. It’s all politics — them against us. I’m going to turn the heat up on these guys like they’ve never felt it before.”

Jake waited, wondering what in the world she was talking about.  

“I can get it together in three days — a press conference. I’m going to blast them out of the water. They can’t do this to Americans and for sure not to my Jake Larkin.”

“You can do something like that?”

“Jake, I’m not just a lawyer. I own my own firm. We have great PR firms to work with, one in DC and one in California. I know people as high up as you can go in California and some in DC, too. When I want to, I can scare the hell out of people. When they grabbed me and dragged me to jail, I gave them one phone number on a card, and it wasn’t my lawyer; and they let me go as fast as they could and offered me a ride in a brand new police cruiser to anywhere I needed to go.”

Almost none of this made sense to Jake. “But I thought you came to DC to protest?”  

“You’re right; that wouldn’t be the establishment thing to do,” she smiled. “Well, that’s complicated, too… Being with you changed me, Jake. Your experiences being a COVID doctor. What you went through. How much you care and how you were finding new courage. How much nobody else seems to care, nobody around me in my whole world. Not my family, or the doctors I know, or the other lawyers… Then trying to find you, seeing what’s going on with January 6, dozens of prisoners like you — they won’t even tell us how many of you there are or where you are — and now personally with you in here and what they’ve done to you. My eyes keep getting opened, wider and wider. I’m almost afraid to see what’s next.” 

Jake’s mind was spinning so fast that he could not reply to Ianna. And then a detail came back. It was after they had been together a while, and he had asked her, “Is it possible—like we were made for each other?” And she had replied, “God does those sort of things,” to which he could only give a nervous laugh. 

“It’s okay for me to do the press conference?” she asked. 

“Yes, anything. A press conference. I wish I could watch it, but I can’t imagine that happening in here.”

“Maybe I can arrange that, too,” she said. Then in her lawyerly courtroom voice, she said, “Your Honor, if my client is not permitted to observe his own press conference, prevented from seeing and hearing what his lawyer has to say and what the responses are, he will be rendered unable to adequately collaborate with me in preparing his own defense.”

“I think the judge will be convinced,” Jake smiled. 

“Jake, I have so much more to tell you. Thank God we have plenty of time. This is really important. I have to tell you this.”

Jake felt a flicker of that dread that so easily came over him in solitary.

“Listen to me, Jake. I’m hoping to have you out of here in days, but no matter how long it takes, I’m never going away. Never ever, Jake. I’ve had sixteen awful months to think about this, Jake. What I’m trying to say, Jake, is that it’s like I’m…wedded to you. I want us to be married. Do you understand?”

Jack hesitated to speak. During his own sixteen awful months in prison, hearing nothing from anyone, he had begun to think his brief encounter with this woman, that this sense of being made for each other, was just craziness. He thought he’d gone too far in his imaginings about her, and now he could barely grasp her taking it so much further, taking control and taking it all the way. He wished he could say something reassuring to her…something filled with love. Marry her? She had no idea how little there was left of him to marry.

Again she seemed to read his mind. “Jake, you don’t have to say anything. I understand. I don’t expect anything of you except permission to be your lawyer and to hold the press conference. I do need you to sign that you have hired me…for one dollar.” 

She put the short paragraph in front of him on the table and handed him a pen. He read it with difficulty — his mind was a jumble — and managed to scribble his name despite the shackles.

“Jake, I’ve got one other thing to tell you. This is the big one.” Her voice dropped a register with emotion. “I’ve got to just blurt it out…”

She was interrupted by a too-loud knock on the door. Curtis, the guard, entered without asking permission. 

“Miss McCormick, not meaning to be disrespectful,” Curtis said anxiously, “But I’ve been told you have to leave, now, straight out of the building.” 

“Curtis, we’ve got so much more to talk about,” she replied with surprising calmness.

“I shouldn’t but I’ll give you one more minute, that’s all,” the guard said emphatically and departed, leaving the door slightly open.

“Jake, I thought we had hours left! I’ve got to tell you something — it’s so big, but it’s wonderful. Jake, you have to trust me, but I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t risk being dragged out in public.”

Now Jake was scared again. “Ianna, what are you talking about?”

“Jake, we have a son! You and me, Jake, we have a child. He’s seven months old, doing wonderfully but he already needs his father…and I do, too.”

Curtis pulled open the door. Now there was fear in the guard’s eyes. 

“Now! Out for your own good. Security is on the way.” 

As Curtis took her elbow and hustled her toward the door, she hurriedly said, “Jake, his name is Jake, too.”  

Curtis started closing the door between them so quickly that her jacket was snagged for a second on the door handle, and she called out to Jake, “Our boy, he’s Jake Larkin, Jr.” Then she was gone.

Jake was left standing there — orange prison garb and shackles — bewildered. Was she an apparition, disappearing into wherever place visitations come from? Or was that his Ianna — telling him they have a seven-month-old son? An infant boy named after him?

To be continued.


Read the previous Chronicles:

1 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 1: “Good Job, X-i-41520-Y10”
2 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 2: Threads of Truth
3 – 
The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 3: First Images of a Pixilated Woman
4 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 4: Yes, Fear This “Thing”
5 – 
The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 5: I Disappeared Myself Into Madness
6 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 6: Breaking Through The Shackles

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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