A Serenade For The Innocent

Chapter 22

h.e.l.lo. My name is Gertrude. I am the little sister of Giuseppe San Sebastian.

I have been well for the most part, just, like, getting by. I"m a married woman now and I"m also a mother, so of course, the stress is still over, like, off the charts stressing, I swear! But this stress of the motherhood and all that baggage that came with it is not as great as when my brother became this really, really mainstream guy because of the gold men case. I"m gonna be real with you though, I really hate that word. I find it offensive, like, the legacy of my big brother will forever be a.s.sociated to this disgusting derogatory term, and as a woman and as the closest person to him after my mom, I feel like I have the responsibility to erase this term from like, the media. That"s why from the rest of this interview, I will refuse to call it, like, the gold men case. I will just call it what it is.

Murder.

My brother and his friends were murdered by that woman, Roberta Cleveland because she knew that my brother knows something about her dirt and she"s planning to erase him the same way he erased my dad. The murder of those men just, like, perpetuated this, you know, this thing with our society where the strong remains as the strong while us, the weak, continues being the weak because these rich people will do everything they can to keep their parties and this entire, like, webs of disgusting white privileged men who continue to control our society. It"s just that my brother is destroying the patriarchy and Rebecca Cleveland, which is a woman, mind you, continues to be a part of the patriarchy because she knows that when women bow down to men, we get to have the leftovers of what they put on their mouths and call it equal rights.

My brother is, and will always be, my hero for standing up against Cleveland and EX-PRESIDENT Riley, but, like, the media doesn"t give a s.h.i.t about his initiatives. They don"t care what his philosophy is and what he wanted to do to preserve society. They just want to be a bunch of pests and they only care about, like, the juicy scoops and the good stories. They are all willing to destroy a grieving family just to scavenge on my brother"s corpse like a bunch of fuc… freaking vultures!

I"m so sorry, I"m being heated up, it"s just, compared to where I am right now and compared to being a mother and a wife, and the stress my mother and I suffered because of the constant attack from the media just… it destroyed us. Really, it did. Every day we would hear them scream outside of our house to have the same statement my mother had been telling them over and over again ever since the case started.

My mother would first entertain them and tell them the truth. My brother was used by those rich privileged b.a.s.t.a.r.ds up there in the White House. She"s right, too, mind you.

I will not believe their claims that my brother was only having, like, drugs and stuff and that"s why he wrote all of those stories. Those are the last words of a dying and desperate man. Okay, I admit that my brother is not perfect, and he"s not supposed to be, but to be brazen enough to call him a junkie because of a syringe beside his letter? That is unfair, and it"s a conclusion that derives from a.s.sumption rather than like, real evidences that would point out on the fact that my brother really, you know, did those drugs thing.


Okay, let"s try to a.n.a.lyze their claims against my brother and why I think they"re all just a bunch of bogus to undermine the suffering my brother had to go through.

First, let me just get this out of the way, I believe whatever my brother wrote in that letter. I think they are real and factual recounting he had given before he succ.u.mbed to the powers of the devil, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I just hope my brother had ascended to a better place after what he had been through. I lived with him for 20 years and we have been very, very close; he"s practically the person who made me who I am right now. Then the whole disappearance happened, and he left us five notebooks containing all of his thoughts and his philosophies, and they are all just beautiful and well-made, but n.o.body gives a s.h.i.t about all those because they only want to know if he dunnit.

What!?

My brother is honest, smart, kind, and sensitive; he is many things, but he"s not a miracle worker. At the very first week when the entire case just absolutely hit every home in America, the only thing they keep asking was who my brother was, who he works for, what is he affiliated with, is he a terrorist, did he kill all those people and stuffed them all in a perfectly created gold carvings of their bodies. I don"t know the science behind it, but the way people would pinpoint the blame to my brother is just so counterproductive that I still blame it for why the case is still unsolved until now.

And then when every expert and authorities kept denying his involvement in the murders, they then discredited his letter by calling him a junkie and a druggie and a white trash and whatever it is they all have in their curse a.r.s.enal. I am just so, so tired, just absolutely tired of all these accusations pointing towards my brother.

Have they actually read his letters? They are all well written, well-doc.u.mented, and his handwriting is just as beautiful as I last remembered it. But they don"t care about that because that"s not the point. The point is that there"s a syringe beside his letter and that the others had morphine inside their bodies.

Like, I"m not a perfect person and I"ve done some questionable thing when I was younger especially when I was in college so I know a lot about drug-addicted individuals. Believe me when I say this, they cannot and will not be able to have a mentality to create such a perfectly crafted story if it really was one; it"s much more impossible to even write all of those words coherently even if they tried their very best.

Also, regarding my brother"s friends. Okay, so they found out that there are drugs in their bodies which might have explained their behavior on what my brother wrote in his letters. Let me ask them this then. Have they actually taken any hallucinogens in their life? I think it"s such a stretch for them to conclude that an entire group of people would stare on the contraband filled with murder water because they"re tripping. They said they saw morphine in their bodies, right? I"m not an expert or anything but based on my personal knowledge, people who are, like, tripping on morphine are usually too f.u.c.ked to even think. They"ll feel, like, all sorts of things on their body and the last thing they would care about is ta contraband filled with water.

Do you know what"s even shadier about this entire morphine-addiction narrative they kept using against my brother? It only started when EX-PRESIDENT Riley suddenly announced a nationwide effort to prevent drug use; it was basically his full-on war on drugs because apparently we never learned from Nixon.

What"s even shadier about this entire outrageous war on drugs thing that happened in the middle of the Riley-Cleveland scandal was how they only allowed the authorities to perform autopsies on the bodies of my brother and his friends a few weeks after the announcement of the war on drugs. Like, isn"t it shady? I mean, sure, Cleveland and Riley still went on a downward spiral regardless of their efforts to clean the evidence against them. The only effect this made is that people started thinking that my brother is the kind of person who would do drugs out of nowhere and suddenly write some messed up gold stories.

I wholeheartedly believe that those people did something the bodies of my brother and his friends, like, there"s no concrete evidence that would support this claim, but since their claims against my brother were all based on a.s.sumptions anyway, then I will do the same and a.s.sume that Cleveland did something in the bodies of those men to make them seem like they had morphine in their system.

No one could prove it to me otherwise. No one could change my mind, no, nuh-uh.

They are all caught up in this drama that they didn"t give a step back to think about what was really happening. There are people out there who were turned into gold, and the first thing they thought to do was to hara.s.s my mother who was already deep in her depression and anxiety.

They would knock at our walls, at the door, at the windows. Every day we would see our faces in all news programs to the point that we just outright refused to open the TV, our phone, we cut our telephone line; we stopped leaving the house, and we pretty much closed all of our blinds.

The worst part about all these was when someone threw a brick at our house and they, like, used this ladder to climb our house just to take a photo of my mother crying and grieving. Like, what was the point of all that? It took them a full month before their number lessened, but like, after a year, we still get the occasional visits from the press.

The only thing I had was my mom and my mom"s best friend who were always with us the entire time. She would tell all the reporters to just f.u.c.k off our property unless she will call the police, and she did all that while helping my mom cope, helping her cook our food, and she was even there to teach me lessons when I don"t want to go to school and s.h.i.t because everyone was bullying me and calling me the sister of the gold head or whatever, and it just got old really, really fast.

I persevered though; I got to stand on my two feet after a long time, but my mom, she… She didn"t make it. She spent the rest of her life reading and reading and reading my brother"s letters. Every day, I would hear her sob, I would see her eyes red and wet, I would even see her cleaning my brother"s room and talking to her clothes and her pictures. My mom went insane and depressed when the entire thing popped and she didn"t have the energy or the time to care about the reporters, but there"s one thing she kept telling me and her best friend. She"d say I believe him, I believe him, he"s my son, I believe him. She"d tell us if she can"t even believe in her son then what is her right to call herself his mother.

I remembered when she, you know, my mom, when finally left the house for the first time. She was holding my brother"s letters, and she"s holding my brother"s favorite white Miniso shirt on one of her hands. I remembered it all so well because we tried so hard to pull her back to the house, but she"s very, very adamant about making a statement.

She screamed at the top of her lungs. She said I believe him! I believe him! I believe him! It was all over the news. There"s even a Time magazine cover dedicated to her and it has this big font that says like, you know, I believe him. And all the reporters in the country flooded our property even more just to hear her say "I believe him" all over again.

They would knock our door even stronger and bang the walls and every night we could not sleep because of all the sounds of the snapping of their cameras. Then we got fed up. We called the cops, it"s quieted down after that. Then we fled to my grandmamma"s place. We didn"t tell anyone about it, not even my mom"s best friend. She"s a sweet woman, just as sweet as my mom. I remembered how my mom looked older than my grandmamma when we got there.

She was all bones, pale; her hair is turning white, her eyes were so swollen, and I remembered how I could wrap my hands around her arms. It was a dark time. The darkest we"ve ever had as a family, but never once did she blamed my brother. She said he was only caught up to the craziness of the world and how my brother did what he thought was right. At that time, I did not understand why he thought too highly of him. I was mad at my brother. I hated him. If he weren"t such a dumb man, then we wouldn"t have to suffer all of these.

Sure enough, a few months after we moved to my grandmamma, my mom died. The last words she said was "I believe him." It was… hmm… I remembered what my grandmamma told me in, like, her funeral.

"So this was what she felt when she saw her child die before her."

It was a dark time for me after that. I messed around with men and women and alcohol and drugs and… I was nowhere to be found. n.o.body knew me. n.o.body saw me. n.o.body knew who I was. n.o.body could find me. I was all over the place after I ran away from my grandmamma"s house. It was a disgusting and degenerate part of my life where I just wished that anyone would touch me or at least murder me so I could see my family again. All of them are gone and I… At the time I thought I had no one else in my life.

Then one time, I don"t have enough money to buy anything else and I was walking around. I was a f.u.c.king mess. Then while I was walking around town, I saw that one thing I could buy.

It was a payphone. I don"t know why, but I went there. I don"t know who to call, but there"s a number in my mind that I want to dial, so I dialed it. I don"t know whose number it was, but it didn"t take three rings before someone said, "h.e.l.lo?"

It was a familiar voice. It was my mother"s best friend. Poor woman, really, she is. We were so unfair to her. I told her all that happened and where I was and what happened to me and she was screaming at me and crying and told me why we left her in the dark. Then she told me about how her life went upside down too. She told me it was a very messed up time of her life and she even had a divorce with her husband and that her business went bankrupt. She told me I was there for my mother and me, but we were gone when she needed us the most.

I just cried. I dropped the phone and cried. I reevaluated my life. What was I doing? I had a lot of people who love me and people who needed my love. I was too caught up in a world I cannot understand and a tragedy none of us understood and I was only 19. I do not know anything and to be honest, I"m not sure if I can say that I, like, understand what was going on still with my life.

I think that was really when I pulled myself back together. I returned to my grandmamma, and she welcomed me with open arms and I had rehab and all is well with my life again.

Then I read the notebooks my brother left our home before he went missing. I read all of it. I didn"t really understand most of it and to be honest, most of what he wrote is a little too radical and too edgy for me at the time. Sometimes when I would read his takes on philosophers like Nietzsche and Baudrillard, I still scratch my head because I can"t understand. He would say that he"s living as a copy of something that doesn"t exist and how he would site the works of Sartre and Hegel. I don"t really understand most of it especially when he would talk about things like Deconstructionism and why he had to be pinned between two worlds when he could escape and form a better world. He would also, like, actively tell almost every page that Freud"s research is bogus and none of them were real and that he praises the works of anti-Oedipus literary critics. He even openly opposes communism, and he called Marx the greatest comedian of his time.

To be honest, I only read all of what he wrote to understand him, and the only thing I understood is that I will never understand my brother at all. I will not understand his philosophies, his life, his reason for living us, and his death. His life is riddled with so much mystery that even if I devote my life to learn all of it, I still wouldn"t understand a huge fraction of who my brother is.

Then when I turned to the last page of his notes. There"s a credit card in it. Then there"s a note attached to it.

"For Gertrude"s studies."

That was when I really asked myself what I was doing.

I just, I"m sorry, I"m really not a crying person, like, it"s been a while since I last cried like this, but thinking about how I thought of my brother so poorly when I was younger when he did many things to support me and my mother while he was away, I just… I realized how selfish and how unaware I am to what is happening around me. I want to speak with my mom and ask her many things, so I could finally ease up my mind, but it"s just impossible, so impossible to happen now, you know? Everything that people did to me is to support me and improve my life. I had everything going for me and then one tragedy struck us because of forces we cannot explain… Then I had the audacity to cry like a little girl.

I borrowed money from my grandmamma and I visited the home of my mother"s best friend. It was an empty lot when I got there. I asked around, and I heard that no one else knew where she is right now. I haven"t even had the opportunity to redeem myself to her, to my mother, and to my brother. So I told myself that I will do my best to redeem myself for myself and when I saw them all again soon with the Lord in heaven, I will tell them that I did not leave without a fight.

Right now I"m just trying to live my life as peacefully as I can. Sometimes I would even dial the number of my mother"s best friend even though I know no one would answer. I guess, more than just clearing the name of my family once and for all, I agreed to this interview because I wanted to meet and reconcile with old friends. I want to reach out to them and help them the same way they helped me. More than clearing the name of my brother, I did all this to mend the crack that was left in our family after the whole gold thing happened. I just want to start again, and I want to tell my friends and family that I can do it even if I"m not perfect. I may not have the same aspirations and dreams that my brother had, and I don"t even have the grand dream of reforming society he once had but… I do wish to live the normal and peaceful life they all hoped I"d have. A life they would die for.

My mom may not be here with us right now, but, in her place, I will say…

I believe him! I believe my brother! He"s not a junkie, he"s not insane, and he"s not a murderer. He"s an innocent man pit between a world he doesn"t understand. He"s a victim of forces we cannot understand and one we cannot fight. He was possessed by the devil in more ways than one. Satan entered through his body and the evils walking among us lit the fire burning in his heart until finally, the greatest evil of all, that d.a.m.n water, finally visited him to claim his soul, but he"s a strong man and I"m sure h.e.l.l did not get the better of his soul because a man with a soul as pure as his deserves to be in heaven where he belongs with my mom and my dad, singing together in the kingdom of the Lord.
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I believe him, d.a.m.n it!