The Woman Who Wouldn't See Their Greatness: Failure to Conform

STATUS: MATRIARCHAL FAILURE TO CONFORM

RESPONSE: WITHDRAWAL — NOT ACHIEVED

IRRELEVANCE — CONTRADICTED BY CONTINUED MONITORING

Part One of Whoknowshowmany

They hated her.

Not dramatically. Not in any way that could be entered neatly into a police report.

That was important.

She wouldn't lie down for them. She resisted everything.

She was a disrupter, although she didn't actually do very much. That was the irritating part. She didn't organize marches. She didn't stand on corners shouting through a bullhorn. She didn't spray-paint slogans on municipal buildings or throw bricks through windows.

She simply maintained an alternative point of view.

In their world, this was considerably worse.

She saw things differently, and then she continued seeing them differently after they had explained to her how things were supposed to be seen.

They could gaslight her, certainly.

But she got angry instead of frightened.

They could tell her something hadn't happened.

She remembered that it had.

They could explain that something perfectly observable wasn't really what it appeared to be.

She would look at the perfectly observable thing.

Then she'd look at them.

"No."

That was her irritating little word.

No.

She was a witness to their dysfunction rather than an accomplice to it.

And witnesses were unacceptable.

An accomplice helped maintain the story.

A witness stood slightly outside it and noticed where the scenery had been pasted together.

Controlling the point of view was enormously important to them. If everyone agreed upon what was normal, normal could be almost anything.

She wouldn't agree.

She was abnormal.

So was her point of view.

Therefore, they became very interested in intimidating the likes of her.

Again: nothing dramatic.

Nothing prosecutable.

Nothing that couldn't be explained as normal.

Someone would appear on her bicycle route.

Fine. Public road.

She would change routes.

Someone would appear there too.

Coincidence.

She'd go hiking instead.

Someone would come around a bend on the trail and hold her gaze a little too long.

People hike.

She'd take the dog out.

Footsteps would appear behind her and remain behind her through three unnecessary turns.

People walk.

At the beach, something would chum the water just offshore where she liked to swim.

Fish.

Perhaps someone had thrown bait into the water.

People fish.

She stopped swimming there for a while.

Dog-poo bags began appearing in the vines beside the path she used every morning.

People were inconsiderate.

She picked them up.

More appeared.

Then litter began accumulating conspicuously beside trash cans.

Not inside them.

Beside them.

Cups. Wrappers. Bottles.

One morning there was a fast-food bag balanced carefully on top of the bin.

She stared at it.

That was almost funny.

The message was never We are doing this to you.

The message was:

You cannot prove that anything is happening at all. It's normal.

And underneath that:

Your reaction is abnormal. You are crazy.

That was the elegance of it.

A person could be followed without being followed.

Everyone had white pickup trucks.

A person could be watched without being watched.

Threatened without being threatened.

Just a bumper sticker.

Just a shirt.

Just a hat.

Nothing ever crossed the line.

Free speech. Free country.

It merely walked beside the line for miles.

And if she complained?

About what?

A man riding a bicycle?

Someone walking behind her?

Trash?

A fisherman?

A dog bag?

A neighbor walking a little too close behind her?

Someone appearing from a side street just as she rounded the corner?

Nothing.

That was the point.

But there was one thing they hadn't anticipated.

She wouldn't acknowledge them.

She understood the architecture perfectly well.

She simply refused to perform her assigned role inside it.

That was maddening.

They were in charge.

She was supposed to notice that.

The objective wasn't necessarily to convince her they would hurt her.

It was to exhaust her.

Make the bicycle unpleasant.

Make the trail unpleasant.

Make the beach unpleasant.

Make walking the dog unpleasant.

Turn ordinary public space into a sequence of tiny calculations until eventually she chose to stay home.

That was how they dealt with others.

Make someone subtly uncomfortable enough, for long enough, and eventually they withdrew their own presence.

Then nobody had expelled anybody.

Nobody had been threatened.

Nobody had done anything.

The cameras would show nothing except the perfectly boring Mayberry they envisioned as great.

The troublesome person had simply stopped coming.

Unfortunately, she didn't.

She changed times.

Changed routes.

Wore earbuds.

Didn't wear earbuds.

Took photographs and videos when she felt like it.

What did she do with them? Who was she sharing them with?

Worst of all, she ignored things when she felt like it.

Picked up the trash.

Left the trash.

Walked directly past people.

Turned around.

Went another way.

Sometimes she smiled.

There was no consistent behavioral response for them to train against.

She remained.

That was the problem.

And she wasn't acknowledging them.

They couldn't be the imaginary powerful majority with her wandering around behaving as though their power were merely another piece of local scenery.

She was a rip in the sail.

A sputter of the outboard motor.

A hole in the net.

A gap in the cage.

Because she wasn't merely refusing to leave.

She continued witnessing.

She noticed the contradictions. The petty hierarchies. The little rituals through which frightened people reassured one another that they were powerful. She noticed how much energy went into maintaining appearances and how little went into repairing anything underneath them.

She noticed the high-tech surveillance system and the simultaneous insistence that this was all just sleepy little Mayberry.

A sleepy little Mayberry that deployed white trucks to areas that needed observation.

Areas that could also use litter pickup.

But that was another matter.

She even noticed the appearance of the substandard parts of the surveillance system, which she repeatedly flipped off for fun, knowing they were capturing crystal-clear images of her giving them the bird.

She smirked when one of their oversized vehicles roared past trailing smoke.

She slowed down.

She cruised.

She enjoyed the scenery.

She rolled her eyes at them.

It was repeatedly noted that she openly smiled and laughed.

Especially at the twins.

Worst of all, she possessed the one quality their system wouldn't tolerate indefinitely:

She could see that reality looked different from different points of view.

They wanted to control the point of view.

Alternative points of view were dangerous.

Alternative points of view were the worst.

The sky was blue.

The ocean was blue.

Everybody knew that.

Except—

What about a cloudy day?

What about wildfire smoke?

Wasn't the sky naturally different shades at different times of the day and year?

And the ocean wasn't actually blue.

She was infuriating.

If one person could stand outside the agreed-upon story and say, That's strange, another person might look and say, Yes. And stupid.

Then another might say, Boring.

Soon someone might ask why everyone had agreed that Mayberry existed as Mayberry in the first place.

They needed her either inside the story or outside the community.

They accomplished neither.

And killing her was impossible.

Not because they were moral.

Because there were cameras everywhere.

The island was saturated with surveillance.

Cameras over shop doors. Cameras on houses. Cameras in cars. Cameras on traffic lights. Doorbell cameras staring across streets at other doorbell cameras.

There were even cameras in the bees.

The bees had been micro-engineered to pollinate.

Sure.

They did pollinate.

The hydrangeas had never looked better.

But the bees also recorded everything in their immediate surroundings, including whose dog's business wasn't being cleaned up, whose dog had peed on the flowers, whose dog had peed on the mailbox, and whose cat crossed the street too frequently and stalked a neighbor's bird feeder.

So physical escalation presented an unacceptable evidentiary problem.

They couldn't make her afraid enough to disappear.

They couldn't make her doubt herself enough to conform.

They couldn't make her join them.

And they couldn't openly remove her.

Eventually somebody asked the obvious question.

"When does she stop resisting?"

The answer came back:

"She sleeps."

And that was how they called the Men With Hats That Make Goats Fall.

This was not immoral, unethical, or in any way wrong.

Because it wasn't official.

It wasn't even believable.

That was what delighted them most.

Surveillance wasn't surveillance if everyone had agreed it was for safety.

Stalking wasn't stalking if it was county workers in county vehicles on county-adjacent property.

Intimidation wasn't intimidation if nobody said anything threatening.

Harassment wasn't harassment if each individual act could be explained away.

The litter accumulating again in the parking lots went unnoticed.

That was not part of the assignment.

They were one big happy Mayberry.

She needed to conform or leave.

They preferred she leave.

She was insane not to see things their way.

The Men With Hats That Make Goats Fall motto was in jeopardy:

Compliance, withdrawal, or irrelevance.

She would not comply.

She wasn't withdrawing.

And her irrelevance was contradicted by their own continual aggravation!

And the bitch kept going on her infuriating bike rides! This was their land! They would take it back and she would learn to submit as women should!