For what I am going to share with you are some occurrences that led to and then emerged from a period of thirteen mysterious minutes during which no one really knows what happened. Dozens of people have spent dozens of months trying to figure it out. Thousands of dollars have been shelled out, too, and untold amounts of stress. Lives have been derailed, careers have suffered, relationships been strained or lost. Violations took place, and crimes. Blood was shed. Yet what happened during those thirteen minutes remains a mystery — one that nearly destroyed the lives of some very nice people.
At the heart of this story sits time: Who controls it, who records it, who mourns it, who allocates its usage. And how and why this happens, and, of course, when. One particular substance upends all our presumptions about the control of time, but we think we know where they land again. Yet who is in control of what and for how long is not so easy to discern.
I will tell you this story, but you must promise not to take up any more of the time of those involved.
But first, a question: How much do you know about Rohypnol?
Early one new year — doesn’t matter which, exactly, since we’re going for the “Once upon a time” sense — a quiet and charming and alarmingly tall man, let’s call him Frank, went to an informal dinner party hosted by an ex-girlfriend, a sweet and kindly teacher, a bit of an artistic soul. We’ll refer to her as Zelda. The two had dated for close to a decade about a decade ago — it doesn’t matter exactly how long or when. The point is that they used to date, and then they stopped, and now they’re friends, but it was all such a long time ago that all you need to know is that they still like each other.
After a couple glasses of wine, the group of several at the party agreed to go out to karaoke at a tacky disreputable bar. If I were to tell you details about this bar, you would accuse me of inventing them, so let’s pretend it was called Gone Fishin’!. The interior of Gone Fishin’! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was decked out in bait and tackle-related geegaws, including a talking wall-mounted trout and various doctored photographs of white men in obtrusive vests with giant walleyes, and all the specialty drinks had names like Wonderbread Standard and Worm on a Hook, and they were supposed to be cute references to picking people up, but they weren’t. I’m setting a scene here (albeit a fake one), and what I want to convey is that the bar was maybe going for hipster in a slightly-more-authentic-than-TGIFriday’s way but nothing about it worked. So people just went there to sing pop songs to each other.
And order cheap drinks. Zelda and her friends and Frank had a few. Frank had never done karaoke before, so he may have had more cocktails than he usually does. Songs were sung, more drinks were consumed. New friends! Rounds were purchased. More songs. One of Zelda’s friends had driven them all there and wasn’t drinking. When someone at the bar sent her and Zelda a couple drinks, the teetotaler passed her gift along to Frank.
Karaoke became aggressive and weird. It was that kind of place, Gone Fishin’!. Stages were stormed, maybe a wall-mounted trout was given a solo, the house got a round, that sort of thing. Some of the new friends began drifting away, other new ones replaced them. Two suspicious dudes, on their way out of the bar, jerked a thumb toward Zelda and Frank and made a snide comment about “Roofie and Friend.”
Their pals agreed later that the two were pretty trashed.
by Anne Elizabeth Moore, TNI | Read more:
Image: Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937
