This newly declassified document provides explicit details from author J.C. Geiger’s captivity during a four week period between September 18th and October 17th. According to police records, Geiger was held in his own home by a skilled operative who followed him and his wife back from a trip to the hospital in mid-September. During his captivity, Geiger painstakingly documented his captor’s techniques, and provides them for us here.
Background:
He was in the backseat when we left the hospital, red faced and screaming. Under duress, we let him into our home. We haven’t left since.
The operative clearly intends to brainwash my wife and I from within the walls of our own home. He seeks nothing less than full-scale psychological domination -- to become the center of our universe. To guarantee we never make another decision without first considering him. He will demand access to bank accounts, personal property, and various lines of credit. When it’s all said and done, I fear he’ll take us for damn near everything we’ve got.
His mission isn’t easy. To succeed, he must raze our previous life it to its foundation, and cobble together a new order of financial priorities and social relationships from the wreckage.
Impossibly? Hardly.
He’ll do it in a matter of weeks. I call it Project Newborn. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: He will break you with lack of sleep.
The operative is clever; to the untrained eye, he never sleeps at all.
This isn’t exactly true. He sleeps while you’re moving. But motion alone is insufficient. Sometimes you’ll be rocking him and think you’d like to look at a newspaper article. Or pick up your phone. Or gaze out the window and remember what it was like to taste the simple thrill of freedom.
But don’t think about that. Don’t even look. His head is so sensitive he can feel your focus shift. It must be the lack of hair. If you make the mistake of looking away, he will wake up. Then he will make you pay. He calls this game: “I Own You.”
This is one game from a very thick playbook.
Another favorite is called the “Sleep-Breathing Switcheroo.” In this gambit, the operative uses the gentle rhythm of inhale/exhale to make the strong case he's asleep. This is meant to entice you to transfer his allegedly sleeping body to the lap of another person or a crib.
Which you will do. If you’re an idiot.
Because he will wake up the moment you try. You may argue your movements were too gentle to have possibly sparked consciousness in any living thing, and you are right. But here’s the catch: He was never actually sleeping.
Gotcha.
Step 2: He will break you with noise.
After two weeks of extensive exposure, you could have as many documented words for types of crying as Inuits have for snow. COULD, because you are only getting three hours of sleep a night, which means you are no longer able to command the English language. Or string together two coherent thoughts. Or tie your shoes without falling over on your living room floor.
You will settle for identifying three basic types of crying:
1) “I’m hungry.”
This insistent, growling wail takes place whenever the operative is hungry. Which is always. Contrary to popular belief, the operative can cry and eat at the same time. Perhaps he is hungry because he is crying too hard to eat. This may lead you to believe the operative is foolish, but you’re wrong. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And he thinks it’s hilarious.
2) “I need your attention.”
This need, like hunger, is constant. Consider this: The operative’s stomach is the size of a walnut, yet he needs to eat every hour. If the operative’s brain is the size of a beefsteak tomato, how often does he need your talking, singing, wide-eyed attention? I would do the math, but I’m too busy bouncing from foot to foot and singing “Under the Sea” from the Little Mermaid.
3) “We have ways of making you talk.”
The only possible explanation for this type of crying is that you have not provided the information the operative is looking for. You have fed him, changed him, sung songs, spoken in baby voices, and bargained your soul to Satan. Yet you have somehow failed to provide the information he needs. Perhaps it is the secret location of a safe you never buried, or the whereabouts of a person you never met. Either way, you have failed to communicate the message the operative needs to hear, and you will pay dearly for your ignorance.
Step 3: He will break you down to build you back up.
So.
Perhaps you once considered yourself a professional. You had self-respect. People once listened to you when you spoke. They looked you in the eye like an equal. Good. The operative likes a challenge.
By the time he’s finished with you, Mr. Respectable, you will be prancing around like a little elf singing songs which glorify his feces. You will thank him for urinating, even if he’s urinating on you. He will throw up on your shirt and you’ll giggle like a child. You will thank him for performing base bodily functions on your property.
He will pay little attention to your thanks, because he’ll be too busy screaming.
Then, in brighter moments, he will insist with coos and giggles you are his prize captive. That you have outperformed his other servants, and you'll feel the warm thrill of accomplishment . . . perhaps even expect a reward. A brief release from captivity. A pass to leave the house, take a shower, or touch your wife.
Then – just as the reward is most deliciously tangible, he will declare, red-faced and screaming, that you’ve utterly failed. You will lose all privileges, including the ability to set him down, eat, or relieve yourself. You’ll doubt everything you’ve ever learned, and will have to start from square one to earn back his love and respect.
Once you do, he will again laugh and coo at you. This is precisely what he wants. Although he cannot yet control the movement of his arms, he is bouncing you like a yo-yo on a string.
Conclusion:
I fear for my sanity. Somehow, the operative has made a month’s captivity breeze by like a summer afternoon. Perhaps I only feel this way due to my pending release. After 30 days of diplomatic maneuvering and high-level negotiations, I’ve scheduled myself for work release first thing tomorrow morning.
I’ll be leaving my wife behind. And, truth be told, I don’t want to go.
His techniques have succeeded. My emotions are tethered to his, and so are my wife’s. When he cries, we pick him up. When he needs us, we’re beside him. And when he so much as looks at me, I feel like I've been chosen for something truly special, and something I can't possibly do. But tomorrow I’m free to step outside, to return the life I had before. And I’m struggling with that.
Because it’s not just that I don’t want to go -- I never want him to leave.
