Dear Reader

Transcribed by olanovena. Many thanks!

Dear Reader,

In the summer that my wife and I began dating, I experienced my first bout of crippling anxiety. I could hardly get out of bed. Air stopped working for me. While people walked down the streets of Manhattan, blithely sucking in oxygen like it would never go away, there I was, somehow drowning. Most women would have justifiably run, but my wife drove out from New Jersey when I was having a particularly bad panic attack, bringing me a pile of comedy DVDs and a box of chocolate-covered strawberries. We took the bakery string from that box and tied pieces of it around each other’s wrists as a reminder of that moment of love before we had even used the word. Almost a decade later, we still have matching bakery strings around our wrists. Don’t worry, we do fresh ones occasionally. It’s not the same ragged string from 2009. 

Bonus: The Window & The Mirror

Transcribed by olanovena. Many thanks!

It was a dream, but not a dream. I was awake, I knew that. But it wasn’t real. I can’t explain it, I can only tell it.

Live ep: The Finish Line

Transcribed by olanovena. Many thanks!

To catch you up...um...shit. Ok. I went looking for my wife, Alice, who I thought was dead. She wasn’t dead. Years passed. We encountered monsters and alternate dimensions, and I think I hung out with a ghost once. Then Alice and I, we came home. That’s basically the story, short version, anyway. Sometimes you don’t need the details, you know? Ok. And so, then, here is what happened after. 

Part 3, Chapter 10: “An Ending”

Keisha: There are no happy endings, because there are no endings. There is always a next moment, even if we aren’t involved in it.

Alice: So many of them… dead. And we have brought them here to fight and to die. Was it our fault? Or was it worth it, it was, right? To end this, right?

Keisha: There is no end to the story. But there is an end to our telling of it. And I think that end has come.

Alice: It was over, and we buried our dead and walked away from that place. Sylvia was gone, or she was – everywhere and would be forever, but wasn’t Sylvia anymore. I didn’t know how to feel about that, because I didn’t know what it was really.

Keisha: Sylvia chose that. She wanted me to know that she chose it. And so I chose to be happy for her.

Alice: Through the night, we drove.

Keisha: We didn’t talk.

Alice: Morning came.

Keisha: And with it, familiar streets.

Alice: She pulled the truck to a stop.

Keisha: We opened the front door.

Alice: And together…

Keisha: And together…

Alice: At last…

Keisha: We came home.

Part 3, Chapter 9: “Praxis”

Keisha: Sylvia was on the ground, trembling. And I understood. She did too. I took her hand. “Guess that was my life,” she said. “It’s not like that,” I said back, cradling her head. “Oh it is. And it wasn’t too long I’m alive. But at least I get to live it forever now. “ Her trembling increased. It wasn’t like shivering or the spasm of muscles. It was like all of her atoms were vibrating with more and more intensity. She became blurry.

When a person believes in an idea or an ideal, or a view of the world, it can change them. It can shake them completely.

The blurriness subsided and there was a person exactly Sylvia’s size in a hoodie. Looking in the hood, I could still see Sylvia’s face looking back. “I want you to know that I chose this,” she said. “I could have gone another way, but I wanted this.” Then her face was gone, and there was only the empty black of the Oracle.

It was always people. Thistle were people and the Oracles were people, and we were all just people struggling for an idea of what being a person should be like.

If people could do all this, then we could undo it. It was time.

Book announcement

Joseph Fink: Hello, it’s me, the author of this podcast. I have a novel called ”Alice Isn’t Dead” coming out on October 30. That’s in just about three months. It is a ground-up, reimagining and retelling of the story we have told in this podcast, and it can be read both by fans of this podcast and by people who don’t know what a podcast is, but have vaguely heard of someone called Joe Rogan.

Check info about the book, the 17-city book tour, and signed preorders now with the possibility of getting personalize signed preorders at aliceisntdead.com.

Signed or no, preorders quite literally make or break a writer’s career, so [chuckling] please consider preordering.

Thank you.

Part 3, Chapter 8: “To Forgive”

Alice: The mountains in Tennessee look almost tropical this morning. Mist over forest canopy, lakes with low bridges. I don’t know what I pictured when I pictured this place, but it wasn’t this. I guess I didn’t picture it. Never bothered to.

Keisha: We come into Nashville. Each city skyline has that one building. The one that lets you know which city you’re looking at, because otherwise every skyscraper is every skyscraper. In New York, there’s the Empire State. In Los Angeles, there’s that round one. I dunno what it’s called, I don’t think anyone does. It’s… you know, the round one. And in Nashville, there’s the Batman building. That’s not what it’s called. I’m sure there’s some architectural reason for its design, but what it looks like is that it’s a building shaped like Batman’s head.

Alice: A soft tap on the cab door while we slept and I was already awake and tensed. A lot of training and even more justifiable worry had gone into my years fighting these creatures, and the slightest sound could mean anything at all. So that’s what I had to be ready for.

Keisha came awake too, in response to my getting up. I put my finger to my lips, crept to the door, and flung it open. The kids screamed. It was a teenage girl. My brain was putting together the pieces and was about to deliver the words “Oh you must be- “, when Keisha screamed too and threw herself past me. “Sylvia! Sylvia, you’re safe!” “Oh, you must be Sylvia,” I said. The girl nodded into Keisha’s shoulder.

Part 3, Chapter 7: “Speakers”

Keisha: In St Louis, across the street from a lunar-themed hotel with a rotating artificial moon on its roof, there is the remains of a fast food drive-through. I dunno how long it’s abandoned, but long enough that someone – the owner or the city or some street artist or who knows – covered all the windows in a stained glass patterned wrap. So you have this little church of an old fast food joint. It’s beautiful and odd. Alice and I happened by it, and for fun we hopped the fence an walked the drive-through.

Alice: The whole system is still there, though it’s missing a menu and a lot of its parts. The speaker still stands crooked, leaning into where cars full of the hungry and stoned once passed.

We stand there a moment and I dare to kiss her, and she dares to let me. It’s been better between us. We went through the drama of defeat and now we have the drive of a mission, and both have started to patch over the wounds of our past.

And just as we kiss, the speaker of this long dead drive-through crackles to life and we hear muffled voices and joyful laughter through layers and layers of static. It sounds like a message from the dead or from another world.

“This place is empty, right?” I say as the speaker burbles away at us. “I’m starting to think nowhere is actually empty,” she says.

Part 3, Chapter 6: “This Isn’t It”

Alice: I don’t know what to say. I think this is it.

Keisha: Is this it? This might be it.

Alice: The story that we had been working on with Tamara Levitts at the LA Times, the one that laid out everything about Bay and Creek and Thistle – that story’s out now. Exhaustively researched. Connections and history even I hadn’t known about, and I worked for Bay and Creek for years.

Keisha: (- mosquitoes) took what was inside of us and injected it into the whole country. There’s no way down from here. Is this it? [sighs] This might be it.

Alice: I don’t know what to say. I think this is it.

Part 3, Chapter 5: “What Happened to Hank Thompson”

Keisha: We encountered the ineffable at a midnight Denny’s. It was accidental. Or at least accidental on our part. I suspect that while we weren’t seeking, we were being sought.

That night we were hungry, that’s all. And, as the official slogan of Denny’s should say: “It’s not good, but it’s there.” Nothing is more welcoming than fluorescent light and fryer fat when coming in out of highway darkness.

Alice: We entered to that smell. The Denny’s smell. Like food, but less so. There was no one waiting to seat us, we didn’t see any waiters at all, but there were a few customers at tables, so it seemed that they were open. We grabbed a couple of menus from the stand and headed toward the back.

The back was a lot further away than it should have been. We kept walking and walking past tables and booths with the occasional customer sitting there. All of the customers staring straight ahead, looking seasick, not talking, like they knew something had gone wrong and were sitting tight until it fixed itself.

Keisha: And then, a couple hundred impossible feet of Denny’s later, an Oracle sitting in a big clamshell booth in the back corner. It was like a gravity well. The metaphysical weight of the Oracle had stretched the Denny’s, and we had rolled our way to the bottom.

The Oracle waved us over. “Come have a seat!” they said. Their voice was friendly but distant, like a casual greeting screamed across the Grand Canyon. “I ordered some seasoned fries, but it might take a while for the guy to find his way here.” What could we do? We sat. I love seasoned fries.

Part 3, Chapter 4: “Three Nights at the Old Motel”

Keisha: “It’s almost ready,” Tamara said. “The article in the LA times. The one that’s going to lay this all out, tell the whole story to the world.” “But I need a bit more time,” she said. “I need to make sure every part of it is verified.” “I understand,” I said. I did. I had waited this long. What was another day, or week, or year? What was a lifetime? “We’ll lay low,” I said. “We’ll wait.”

Alice: For three nights, we got off the grid. Afterward, things were different between us. I’m still not sure what happened at that motel. Can’t piece together any part of it. I don’t know Keisha’s half, and I definitely don’t understand what I saw.

Keisha: But we were different after the motel. I don’t think the rest of this road trip would have happened as it did without those three nights.

Part 3, Chapter 3: “Means of Escape”

Keisha: Beyond the sink is a bed. Sitting on the bed is a person in a gray hoodie, hood pulled up. Their face is lost in the shadow. But I think I know now I could go as close as I wanted to that hood, and still wouldn’t be able to see a face.

They sit on the edge of the bed, body toward us, a hand on each thigh. I expect to feel a wave of powerful energy coming off of them, but I don’t.

Alice: A cloud passes over the sun. It gets dim in the trailer.

Keisha: “We’ve come a long way to talk to you,” I say. They say nothing back. Anxiety is working my gut, but it does the same when I’m ordering pancakes at a truck stop, when I’m getting up to pee in the middle of the night. I can’t trust my anxiety.

Alice: But there were no clouds in the sky.

Keisha: “Hello?” I say. Silly. If they wanted to respond, they would.

I reach out, hesitant but knowing what I need to do. I touch them. They slump backwards. The Oracle is dead.

Alice: From outside, I hear a wet huffing and whooping. I don’t even have to look out the window to know…

Keisha: The trailer is surrounded by Thistle Men.

Part 3, Chapter 2: “Surroundings”

Keisha: The highway was miles back. The ground here is flat to the horizon. Sunbaked, waterless. A single Airstream trailer there in the middle of this nowhere.

Alice: Far enough from the border that whoever, whatever, lives in there wouldn’t get hassled so much by the jackboots. I doubt anyone passes through this region unless they’re seriously lost or looking to get that way.

Keisha: West Texas doesn’t fool around when it comes to concepts like “arid” and “hot” and “lonely”. This is land that is overtly hostile to the living.

Alice: And yet here we are, and here’s this airstream, a blinding pixel of brushed metal reflecting sunlight from miles into the distance. Whoever or whatever we’ve been looking for? They’re in there.

Keisha: Because there are oracles on these roads.

Alice: We hope.

Part 3, Chapter 1: “Cause and Effect”

Keisha: This is not a story. It’s a road trip. And like any road trip, the stuff that ends up important isn’t the stops planned along the way, but the detours you’re forced to make. The weird vignettes caught out of the corner of your eye. The places you never thought you’d end up, and that you’ll never return to.

This isn’t the ending I thought we were heading for. But it’s the ending we’re gonna get.

Alice, I… but not Alice.

I don’t talk to her this way anymore.

Live show: Los Angeles, California

On October 30, we are releasing the Alice Isn’t Dead novel, a complete reimagining of the story from the ground up. It is a standalone thriller novel for anyone looking for a scary page-turner, whether they’ve heard this podcast or not. Available for preorder now. And preordering helps authors out tremendously, so please consider it. Thanks so much!

Hi, this is Joseph Fink. What you’re about to hear is the live Alice Isn’t Dead performance at the Largo in Los Angeles on April 5, 2018. This live episode was not any material from the podcast, but instead was a standalone show focused on the weird and interesting sites and places of LA. It was an incredible night, and thank you to those who came out to see it. Enjoy the show.

--

Oh. I’m sorry, I uh, I didn’t expect um, I-I didn’t know that anybody would be listening. [clears throat] OK. Um, when you tell a story, you should expect an audience but sometimes I don’t think about that. I just tell the story the same way I breathe, just move life in an out of my body.  I suppose you could listen if you want.

My name is Keisha. I’m a truck driver. It’s weird isn’t it the-the way say our jobs as though they were an identity rather than a thing we do for money. I mean do you think that outside of capitalism we’d confuse our self image with what pays the bills? [chuckles] Sorry. I-I got away from myself. Story not polemic, right.

Part 3 Prologue 2: Mérida, Yucatán

Hello. I’m, uh, Alice. I…

Sorry, I’m not used to talking like this. [chuckles] I’ve had to keep my own counsel for a while. Had to go by what seemed right to me.

I know I have a lot to answer for. And I will, I’ll answer for all of it.

There are many places I’ll never go. Almost an entire world of them. There are 195 countries in the world right now, depending on which government you ask. How many of those do I think I’m going to get to in one lifetime? Not many.

I’ll never go to Mérida, colonial capital in the Yucatán jungle. All the walls painted pastel, the old buildings built by Spanish slavers and now those mansions are market halls and McDonald’s. The sky is a hot sheet of glass during the day and at night the air is so wet and hot that sleeping feels like drowning.

I’ll never go in there. Not in this life.

I have my own story, you know. Of course I do. We all have our own stories, right? I don’t have time to tell mine right now, but I will. But I’ll try to, later. I owe that much. Not to you, I guess, I, I don’t care about you. To her. I owe that to her.

It’s been three days since Arizona and the heat on us is still intense. We’ve been hiding out in some backwater that hasn’t seen real traffic since the 50’s. Of course, that can bring its own kind of attention. Newcomers stick out, so even here we try to keep a low profile.

They want to find us and crush us. We’ve revealed ourselves now. Open war, and we intend to win.

Mérida, where the people will still speak Mayan despite the best efforts of the colonizers. Where the office workers line up to buy cheese and tomato sandwich at the little windows of El Centro. Mérida, on the unfashionable side of the Yucatán peninsula. Hours of jungle highway away from Cancun and Playa del Carmen. A world of sights I’ll never live to see.

But I’m not dead yet, haven’t you heard? Of course, this is all before. Before Keisha and I become what we’ve become. Before we understand Praxis, before what happens to Sylvia, before all of that.

But it’s coming. I can feel it, heavy and turbulent in the distance. I wish I could explain, but maybe clarity is just another place I’ll never get to see.

--

Alice Isn’t Dead part 3. A special episode coming on April 10, and Chapter 1 on April 24. The Alice Isn’t Dead novel, a complete reimagining of the story, with lots of new nooks and crannies, comes out this October. If you think you might like it, please consider preordering, as that helps authors out tremendously. To help us make this season, you get all sorts of fun stuff like director’s notes and live streams and bonus road stories. Check out the Alice Isn’t Dead Patreon. We very much appreciate all of our supporters. See you Los Angeles folks in just a couple of days with our rare Alice live show. And see the rest of you on April 10 right here.

Season 3 Prologue: “Perth, Western Australia”

There are many places I’ll never go. I have been to every state in the continental US, plus three Canadian provinces and a scattering of European countries on a vacation years ago.

But most of the world? I’ll never see first-hand. I hear about it, look at photos. These days I can pull up Google Maps and feel like I’m walking their streets. But I’m not. I will never go there.

I will never go to Perth. Isolated Perth, alone on the western coast of Australia. 1,300 miles to Adelaide, the nearest city of any real size. The architecture is a dreamscape of 70’s southern California. Latticework and cinderblock and stucco. Even in its downtown, the pedestrian feels its distance. Out on the beach, white sand, swimming pool blue water. Helicopters overhead keeping an eye out for sharks. It feels like the end of the world.

Due east to South Africa is almost 5,000 miles of ocean. And I will never go there.

I don’t even know who I’m talking to. Not to Alice, not anymore. So now I’m talking to the collective you. You all.

[sighs] Circumstances are very different from the last time I spoke to you. Now I am fully in this war. It’s easier in that the objective is clear. It’s harder in so many other ways. I’ve lost a lot of freedom.

Freedom, of course, can be good or bad. I’ve lost both kinds.

It shifted for me when I started learning what Thistle is. Because I had imagined so many possibilities. Flying saucers, hanging red, lit and malevolent, beaming down loose-skinned monsters. Or a cave somewhere, maybe Chile, or maybe Wisconsin, or maybe on the shores of the Bering Strait. A crack in the mountain wall, and every few years out festers a Thistle Man. But I was imagining in the wrong direction.

I’ve been to Tennessee and I’ve been to Oregon, and I’ve been to the southernmost point of Florida. But I will never go to Perth. I can read you facts I’ve (surmised) from the internet, from looking at photos and reading the accounts of others. But I’ll never live a day long enough to see those white sand beaches. To look out across blue water and think: 5,000 miles to Africa. And walk barefoot on the warm concrete up to the beach pavilion, to buy myself a soda on an afternoon with not a cloud in the sky.

50 more miles to Arizona. The explosives are in the back and they’re ready. More soon.

Alice Isn’t Dead: part 3 starting soon. Check out the cover and first chapter of the Alice Isn’t Dead novel on entertainmentweekly.com right now. You can preorder that novel, and preordering very much helps authors out. So if you take two seconds to go online or to your local bookstore and let them know you want a copy, we would deeply appreciate it. See you for Alice live in LA on April 5, and see you here with the final part of our story this April.

http://ew.com/books/2018/03/26/joseph-fink-alice-isnt-dead-novel-excerpt/