Different Trajectories

The rain has stopped. The streets hold that temporary cleanliness precipitation provides, before the world begins accumulating history again. I need movement. Air. Distance from yesterday’s velocity, 14’s hand reaching out, my terror detonating, the stuffed rabbit in its corner surrounded by lightbulbs I don’t remember purchasing.

I step outside.

The harridan's brother stands three meters ahead. Stick in hand, not walking aid but implement, weapon, tool for purposes I can infer but not confirm. His eyes wide open.

He sees me. Recognition flashes across features that rearrange themselves into configuration my nervous system reads as threat before conscious processing completes analysis.

Terror arrives physically. Not an emotion, but a mechanical response, a cardiovascular spike, vision narrowing, muscle fibers receiving evacuation protocols from autonomic systems that don’t wait for rational assessment.

I run.

Door. Lock. Deadbolt. Chain.

Inside, chest heaving, hands shaking with adrenaline that has nowhere to discharge.

I sink onto couch.

This fear. This mechanism that fires without my consent, transforming ordinary encounters into threats, making me flee from extended hands and men with sticks and situations where objective danger might not exist at all.

I need to understand what happens when fear arrives. I need to map the process, identify the triggers, determine whether my terror is detecting actual danger, or a misfiring system seeing threats in neutral data.I cannot keep running, operating according to a programming I don’t understand.

So: isolation. Minimal external contact until I’ve resolved this. Until I can distinguish between the fear that protects and the fear that sabotages.

The book sits on the table, was it there before? Did I bring it yesterday? The timeline fragments; my memory is uncertain about which objects arrived through which mechanisms.

The cover shows two boys, stylized silhouettes against urban geometry. Title in bold sans-serif: Parallel Trajectories.

I retrieve water. Settle into chair positioned to see both door and window, strategic placement my body chooses without conscious instruction.

Open to the first page.

The city operates through invisible governance. Not official administration, mayors, councils, public services performing their documented functions, but the actual mechanisms of power. Clan territories mapped onto neighborhoods like overlapping frequencies, each broadcasting on channels only initiated receivers can detect.

Two boys grow up three blocks apart. Close enough to share schools, playgrounds, the specific atmospheric pressure of childhoods lived under systems that claim not to exist.

The first boy, call him A, possesses the kind of intelligence that makes teachers uncomfortable.

His father runs a construction supply business. Legitimate on paper, profitable in practice. The family occupies comfortable middle-class stability until the day everything inverts.

Debt arrives like weather system that had been gathering beyond visible horizon. The father borrowed from wrong sources to expand operations, made calculations based on projections that assumed continued growth, not sudden market contraction. When revenues collapse, the debt remains. Compounds. Metastasizes.

Loan sharks don't forgive miscalculation. The father begins drinking with a methodology that suggests he’s discovered a solution, not a symptom. Alcohol transforms him from a businessman into a ghost occupying his own body, performing motions that no longer connect to outcomes.

A watches his father dissolve. Watches the business fail. Watches creditors arrive with frequency that establishes new rhythm for household operations. Then the sister dies. Newborn, barely two weeks of breathing. The mother's grief doesn't follow expected trajectories, it doesn’t soften or integrate into bittersweet memory. Instead, it calcifies into something that warps everything around it.

She begins accepting invitations from men who smell of expensive cologne and political influence. Not prostitution, the transactions carry more complexity than simple exchange of sex for money. She's networking, the father claims during rare moments of lucidity. Building connections that will help the family recover.

But A understands what his father refuses to see: she's establishing herself as commodity in a market where bodies with the right presentation can access spaces closed to direct financial negotiation.

The father dies when A is fifteen. Liver failure, technically, though the actual cause is more accurately described as systematic self-deletion through chemical means.

By then, A has already been introduced to the construction networks, not his father's legitimate business, but the actual architecture of urban development. How permits get approved, inspections get passed, buildings rise on foundations that wouldn't survive honest engineering review.

He excels in school. Top marks in mathematics, physics, structural analysis. Teachers write recommendations suggesting university, engineering programs, research opportunities. He graduates from high school and stops.

The organizations have been watching. They recognize useful intelligence when they encounter it. They make offers that don't require formal articulation, just presence in the right room at the right moment, just awareness that certain paths have been cleared while others remain blocked.

By twenty-five, A is a a man of honor. Not foot soldier but a manager, designing the invisible scaffolding that supports operations requiring sophisticated logistics. Drug routes that optimize for minimum detection probability. Money flows that fragment across enough institutions to resist simple auditing. Building projects where construction serves as theatre for activities occurring in spaces between official documentation.

His intelligence finally finds appropriate application. The clan values capability over credential, results over resume. He rises.

I set the book down. Pour water, drink it standing at kitchen window watching rain transform street into river carrying village detritus toward the drainage systems.

Pick up the book again.

The second boy, call him B, loses his father at age four. Accident, the family explains, though the circumstances remain vague in ways that suggest intentional obscuring rather than traumatic amnesia.

His mother sends him to live with paternal grandparents in a village three hours from the city. A strategic placement. The grandparents provide what she cannot, stability, attention, the kind of unconditional care that doesn't require B to earn his existence through performance.

The grandfather teaches him to recognize trees by their bark, stars by their position relative to horizon markers, seasons by which flowers bloom in which sequence. Knowledge that operates through observation.

The grandmother feeds him properly, the specific alchemy of food prepared by someone who understands that cooking is care made tangible.

His mother visits irregularly. When she comes, she brings gifts that cost more than the grandparents' monthly budget. Men with expensive cars sometimes drive her to the village, wait outside while she visits, then drive her back to the city and whatever life she maintains there.

B doesn't question this arrangement. Children rarely interrogate the architecture of their existence until they've accumulated enough data points to recognize the activity.

He excels at school through diligence. He studies law at university, where he encounters different corruption. Not street-level clan operations but institutional rot disguised as academic excellence. Professors who advance through favors. Research positions allocated based on political connections. Thesis committees that function as gatekeeping mechanisms protecting established hierarchies.

He observes without participating. Completes his degree. Passes his examinations. Becomes magistrate.

The position places him in territory where the law intersects with the systems the law claims to regulate. He investigates building code violations, discovers patterns suggesting coordination, not isolated negligence. He follows construction permits back to approval processes that operate through networks he’s beginning to map.

Drug trafficking appears in the same investigations, an integrated operation using building projects as cover for logistics that require legitimate business infrastructure.

Homicides emerge from the data. Bodies that appeared at construction sites at statistically improbable frequency. Deaths classified as accidents or suicides that cluster around specific contractors, approval timelines, political administrations.

All roads converge toward fields he recognizes even before he identifies circumstantial individuals. The intelligence behind these operations displays sophistication that exceeds typical organized crime.

When he finally assembles enough evidence to identify A, the childhood friend who lived three blocks away, who disappeared into systems B had chosen to remain outside of, the recognition carries a weight beyond professional obligation.

A receives notification through channels that operate faster than the official legal process. Someone warns him. Someone with access to the investigation provides advance notice that the magistrate is closing in, that arrests are imminent, that the only question is whether A will be taken alive or found having made a different choice.

A hangs himself in his apartment. Single rope, ceiling beam, chair kicked away.

B finds him. Not officially, another magistrate makes the official discovery, but B goes to the apartment before formal investigation begins. Stands in the room where A performed his final act.

They could have been brothers. Three blocks apart, similar intelligence, different fortune in the architecture of care that surrounded their development.

The investigation closes. B processes paperwork. The organizations adjust, replacing A with someone less capable but more replaceable. The construction continues. The drugs flow. The bodies accumulate.

I close the book.

The stuffed rabbit watches from its corner. Lightbulb boxes form protective barrier around soft fabric body.

I think about two boys three blocks apart, intelligence finding different applications based on which systems surrounded their development. Grandparents providing sanctuary versus mothers providing access to power. Magistrates investigating network turnovers. Suicides resolve investigations more efficiently than trials.

About fear responses.

In the village, men with sticks walk through streets for purposes I cannot determine from isolated observation. Hands extend in gestures that might signal connection or capture. Books arrive containing stories about parallel trajectories that converge toward hanging bodies and closed investigations.