In the last month of the last year of the twentieth century, I write JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES, four years after the world had accepted "Conjurella" as art, but dismissed it as testimony. So this is the story of Jackie of the Old Places, the REAL Jackie, who put up the great T. Casey Brennan fan page, who promoted me and said I had a fan club at her school, the REAL Jackie, who, at 13, posted my old comics from the 1970s, and tried to help me to defect to Iran, Iraq, or Cuba, the REAL Jackie, who, only in dreams, had given herself up on Amber Day to the serpents of the Old Places. The REAL Jackie, not the one in "Conjurella", not the one in David Ferrie's gunsight, as I collapsed to the floor after firing my single, only shot, trying desperately to push the braced rifle out the window as I fell, as my tormented father shouted through Ferrie's gunfire: "Don't shoot Jackie, Ferrie! Don't shoot Jackie, or I'll kill ya right now!" Somewhere on the Internet, I read that Baron George deMohrenschildt had something to do with a charity that had something to do with Jackie Kennedy. He had known Lee, and testified before the Warren Commission. Of my memory of him, demolished by Dr. Earnshaw's amnesiac injections, only this remains: he was a basicly good man, caught up by circumstance, not because of the Kennedy assassination, because none of us had anything to do with it (well, except for me, and I was so drugged and hypnotized and terrorized that I didn't even know what I was doing), but because of something else. DeMohrenschildt was of Russian birth. The war years had concealed the murderous purges of Stalin, as well as the true extent of the Nazi death camps. While Dresden burned under saturation bombing, railroad lines leading millions into camps like Auschwitz and Dachau went untouched by Allied attacks. And while Stalin carried out a similar persecution and murder of millions - some in Russia, and in the rebellious Soviet occupied Baltic states, chose to favor the temporary rescue from Stalin's troops that a Nazi victory might bring. Like my late mother's agent, Kurt Singer, served the O.S.S., deMohrenschildt served the Nazi intelligence apparatus. Those Russians who made this choice must be judged in the context of history; Stalin massacred whole villages - to a Russian whose parents had been killed by Stalin, those two deaths carried greater meaning than the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. DeMohrenschildt: I forgive you, now, too late, in the year 2000, more than twenty years after I have, unwittingly, brought about your death. Serpents of the Old Places, hear them: grant them peace, grant them rest. Continued on Page (5 of 9) ... Back