The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Buffalo Scuffle - 10/14/04

Thursday, October 14, 2004

I've got to hurry us back to the present, here. Here it is already Thursday and I'm still telling you about Sunday. Just too focused on every detail, when maybe I shouldn’t be. But this is a kind of coping. Sense-making.

Anyhow—back to Sunday. Our original plans had included more D.C. attractions that would stuff my friend full of History with a capital H and Culture with a capital C. But now that I’d told him everything, he thought we should pursue other plans—some avenues of research. I saw the logic in this, but I felt bad about having him spend the rest of his vacation with me looking up obscure pieces of information.

“Sure you don’t want to stop by another museum first?” I asked. “They’ve got an exhibition of Mughal art from India over at the Sackler Gallery that’s supposed to be really good—”

“I had quite enough of that stuff yesterday,” Rence said. Meaning not Mughal art from India in particular, but fine arts in general.

And I did believe him. Rence is the type of guy who will head right for the shrunken heads and the bearded lady when the traveling carnival comes to town. (Me, I prefer the halls of mirrors.) So—perhaps it was for the best. But I promised him that we’d try to seek out some fun in the evening.

We headed over to the place to find answers, the Library of Congress, which, if not the largest library in the world, has got to be in the top five. Since this wasn’t a tourist visit, I’ll skip the gushing descriptions of the Great Hall at the library, and so on and so on. You don’t care about soaring arches and beautiful marble floors, right? You want data. And so did I—the kind of data that Google and Lexis-Nexis hadn’t been able to give me.

I liked Rence’s suggestion to start at the beginning—who was Lynne Samuelson, anyway? And why on earth couldn’t I find any article about my sending her to the hospital? Surely even though it was a long time ago, reporters and newspapers still existed. I mean, a kid stabbing a teacher? The Union Leader would have been all over this story.

So we were able to chase down archives of the New Hampshire paper, actually. And we did find mention of a Lynne Samuelson! (Or rather, her real name, the one I haven’t been sharing with you.)

According to the article—Ms. Samuelson had an “accident” that required medical treatment. No kids mentioned whatsoever. No mention of a knife wound.

Reading this, I thought back to the purple who seemed to be working for the Kerry campaign. And I said to Rence, “Hey, if they can embed themselves in our politics, why not our newspapers too? If you wanted to control people, but you also wanted to stay behind the scenes—you’d pretty much have to infiltrate the government, the media, research institutions, everything, right?”

“They’re heeeere,” he said, smiling. Which movie was that from again? I couldn’t remember—I was focused more at the time on the unease in Rence’s eyes. Which weren’t smiling at all.

Samuelson herself wasn’t given much of a biography in the article, and I couldn’t find an obituary for her. Meaning, probably, that she survived the attack. She could still be out there. She might have even moved to D.C.!

This left me still with a lot of questions—like, had Samuelson started off as a normal person before growing an aura and (apparently) turning evil? If she had always been an aura person, meaning not human from the start, where did she come from? She and all of the others?

We moved on to the next area that intrigued Rence—the two pieces of graffiti, INER and FADE.

And we actually got a couple of hits for Institute of Neurological/Encephalic Research, looking up the name in their database. Two periodicals from the eighties had mentioned INER in passing, in the context of discussion about Alzheimer’s research. Memory research, in other words. The database only showed us abstracts; we had to go and hunt down physical copies of the journals.