Beyond Konspiracy

‘JAC / Just Another Coffeehouse’ was a coffeehouse in Upper West Side, New York.  The coffeehouse’s storefront was about 4 meters (13 feet) wide and stretched into its tenant building about 20 meters (66 feet) long.  The coffeehouse had the raw concrete floor and the coffee bar was set up using plywood.  A couple of different colors were used to paint the coffeehouse; blue, sky blue, light yellow and white.  The coffeehouse had chairs and couches.  Chairs had round seats and single legs; they were the kind of chairs that you saw in 60s style American diners, the kind of places that you ordered drinks and foods like coffee, milk shake, burgers and fries, French toasts, pancakes and cheese cakes.  Those chairs were placed in the entrance half of the coffeehouse.  Couches were placed in the far side of the coffeehouse from the entrance and there were one seater couches and two seater couches; they looked like used couches, but you couldn’t tell whether the coffeehouse bought used ones or they had used them for a long time, and, as a result, they looked used.  Some could call the design of the coffeehouse ‘modern’, while others could call the same design ‘chaotic’.  In the center of the coffeehouse was there a computer connected to the Internet.  Many coffeehouses had similar setups, and this particular set up in ‘JAC’ was nothing unusual; the computer connected to the Internet was available to customers.  Right next to the computer was there a one seater red couch, and that was where Mary Anne Rose sat.

She was reading the personnel section of Village Voice, the most popular town paper in New York City.  There were a number of ads of presumably single men and women, looking for friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, potential husbands and wives.  Mary Anne was single at the moment, but she was not looking for a boyfriend or a husband; she was just looking at the personnel and killing time.  It was actually quite entertaining to look at single men and women’s ads.  Some said that they looked very attractive, while others said that they looked average.  “That’s funny.  I see a bunch of ugly guys and girls around the city”, said she to herself while smiling.  Some described that they were well off, while others said that they had great incomes.  She thought “Sure, there are many very rich men and women in New York, but the average American has 9k credit card debt, you know?  That’s just the credit card debt.   Many have car loans, student loans and mortgages.  So, statistically speaking, how many of these guys and girls in this personnel are really well-off?”; she had no expression on her face this time.  She kept reading ads and found one ad by a 29 years old man saying “Let’s not get tense about this.  I want us to become friends and get to know each other.  No rush and let’s take it slow first.  And then, we’ll see what happens …” Mary Anne grinned at the ad, closed her eyes just for a second and sighed only slightly.  “Oh, come on, give me a break.  Translation: ‘Sex, first and foremost, preferably 3 hours after I meet you for the first time and deal with whatever comes up next.’  Men want sex, and that’s given.  Why can’t they be honest?”  She put down Village Voice and she shipped her Mocha.  She casually wondered whether there was a single honest man around.  She thought about it for a few seconds, and she suddenly recalled a guy that she met about seven years ago.  She was 22 then, and the guy was a year younger than her, so he was 21.  She spent several days with him, and at that time, she did not think much of him.  She kind of liked him, but when she was with him seven years ago, she felt that he was just one of a dozen men that she met, got to know and spent some time with.  But, as seven years passed, she realized that meeting him was the turning point of her life.

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Mary Anne looked like a real New Yorker; she dressed like them and she walked like them.  She didn’t have New York accent, but her English sounded very much like American accent today, so most people assumed that she’d been in New York or in U.S. for some years though they suspected that she was not originally from New York.  Obviously, people didn’t know how she spoke unless they heard her speaking, so most people didn’t even suspect that she was from elsewhere when they first saw her.  Given that she looked very comfortable as she walked around the city, people assumed that she’d been in New York for several years at least.  The last assumption was correct; she’d been in New York for six years now.  The second assumption about her having been in U.S. for some years was not entirely correct; she’d been in U.S. for six years and that was it.  She only lived in New York, though she visited a couple of different places out of the state.  The first assumption about her being a real New Yorker was sort of correct since New York was her town now, but most people didn’t guess where she originally came from.  She was from Caribbean; she was born and grew up in a little island called “Jamaica.”

Her memory flashed back and remembered her last days in the island.  She remembered that her last days started just like any other day; she was just hanging out in Montego Bay, Jamaica.  She was thinking that it was going to be just like any other day, but, as she looked back, that was the day that her life started turning to a different direction.  That was seven years ago.

2. Montego Bay, 1996

Mary Anne Rose sat on a chair in an empty outdoor restaurant.  Her friend Julienne sat next to her.  It was almost eight in the evening and dark outside.  She looked at her clothes and thought that she didn’t pick right clothes tonight.  She didn’t have a lot of clothes, but she had enough; she usually picked right clothes and made her look very attractive, but she thought that she looked rather lame tonight.  Montego Bay was a small city, so there weren’t that many people; she was also in the east half of the city now, the area that tourists stayed, so there were even less people, which meant that far less girls competed with her on attracting men.  Plus, she looked fine even with the clothes that she felt ‘lame’, so she should stand out among other girls.  But she felt like she was not living up to her full potential and that bothered a little, though no one around her could tell what she was thinking except for her friend Julienne.

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Mary Anne Rose was born and grew up in a small village near Montego Bay, Jamaica.  Average crime rate in Jamaica was very high, but the village was not like many towns of high crime rates in Jamaica though it was certainly not the safest or the most peaceful place to grow up as a child.  She could not help herself getting to know criminals and gangsters as a result.  Drug related crimes were rampant, and murders were also not uncommon.  There was no industry or established education system in the country, so a lot of people eventually grew up to become criminals.  While she did not waste her time hanging out with them, she did not exactly become a studious young woman or a career woman.  The latter option was very difficult though because there were really no real jobs offered by multi-national corporations, nor were there any real businesses.  Hospitality industry was the only existing industry, and there was nothing else.  What she grew up to become was a kind of hustler.  She was not as ruthless or greedy as a real hustler, but she was that categorically speaking.  She was not the female version of womanizer or misogynist, but she could make herself to not be attached to any men emotionally.  In that sense, she had characteristics of the hustler.

She had a very attractive physical figure.  She was about 170 cm (5’7) tall; she had very smooth and strong skin.  There was no pimple, dark spot or scar on her skin.  Like many other women in the island, she had very dark skin.  She was slender compared to other women of African descent but had the ideal figure in the eyes of Americans and Europeans.  Breasts and hips were perfectly shaped.  She had large eyes and straight nose; lips were rather small but not thin.  Had she been a little taller, she had a fair shot at becoming a fashion model.  Many fashion designers, especially those in Europe, were very keen on using slender radiant looking women of African descent, so this was not exactly an impossible dream to her; in fact, she was kind of encouraged to become a model.  She met a man from Europe about three years ago in Montego Bay; she already started hanging out and spending a lot of time with tourists then.  He worked in the fashion industry, and he casually suggested that she give it a shot at becoming a model though he admitted that it would have been ideal if she had been a little taller.  She thought about it for a while but never pursued to become a model, nor did she think about it very seriously.  She thought about getting out of the island though.  Over the last couple of years, she met many men from U.S. and Europe.  She learned that they belonged to a different world from the world, a part of which was her island, not just in the sense of geography but in the sense of the social structure and the fundamental wealth in the society.  She knew that, as she watched events from U.S. and Europe, U.S. and Europe were a part of the different world.  She spent a lot of time with men from U.S. and Europe, so she naturally spent a lot of time at hotels, bars and restaurants hosting and serving Americans and Europeans.  They showed programs by CNN and BBC, and she learned a lot about U.S. and Europe from those programs.  But, as she actually spent time with men from those places, she physically experienced that they belonged to the different world.  They spoke differently from men in the island.  They ate differently.  They made love differently.  Many of them read.  They thought differently.  They treated her and other women differently from the way that men in the island treated them.  She shared meals, drinks, walk on the beach and yacht ride around the island with those men, but they belonged to the different world and she didn’t belong there.  She hoped that, a man from that different world would come and get her out of this island someday.  She said to herself, “Why not?  I look great.  I see how Americans and Europeans look at me.  They want me, and I see that in their eyes.”  She was right; she was a beautiful woman.  “Forget morals and ethics.  I’ve got the look, so why not use it?” said she to herself.

She had a friend, Natasha.  Natasha and she used to hang out in Montego Bay up until a year ago.  Natasha was pretty though not as pretty as Mary Ann.  She was slightly taller than Mary Anne though; she also had a little more exotic face.  Her nose was a little taller, and her eyes were sharp.  She met a man from Germany a year ago; he was in his early thirty’s and single.  He was not a millionaire but well off.  He arranged the passport and a visa for her so that Natasha could go visit Germany and stay with him for a while.  This meant that she essentially got the permanent entrance path to Europe.  She knew that the man would just lose interest in her a year from then, but she was not concerned about that.  She had the permanent entrance path to Europe; that was what really mattered to her and nothing else really mattered.  When Natasha got the passport and the visa, she thought, “Who knows?  While I’m Europe, I can just find a way to go to U.S. or Canada if that’s what I want to do.”  She was right; at the moment that she got her passport and the visa, she belonged to the different world, and she knew that she would not come back to the world where she was born and grew up.  She flew to Germany two weeks later, and she was gone.   Mary Anne thought that Natasha got the chance a little earlier than she did.  She did not feel any resentment toward Natasha; she felt very happy for Natasha.

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Mary Anne spent too much time sitting today, so she wanted to stand up and stretch her legs.  She walked around the empty restaurant and then walked to the side facing the ocean; she reached the end and stood for a few seconds.  The restaurant that she was in was built on the mountainside, so she could look down the traffic and pedestrians on the main street running along the coastal line.  She looked around and saw passersby.  She saw the usual crowd.  Men in mid 30s; some were by themselves, while others were with local girls; they were from either U.S. or Europe.  A few blond women here and there with local boys; they were mostly from U.S.  They looked like they used to look attractive; they still looked ok, but they definitely passed their prime and it was somewhat obvious that they came to the island to look for flesh.  And young girls from East Asia; they all dressed like black girls in U.S., though their clothes were far more expensive than what real black girls wore in U.S.  They were always with local boys; she wondered if she missed anything in men in the island because there had to be good reasons why girls flew all the way from East Asia to meet men in the island.  She couldn’t think of good reasons, and then she said to herself, “Well, most things in this world are so explicable.”  She was going to turn around and go back to where Julienne sat, but she saw a young guy who looked like he didn’t exactly blend into the crowd.  He looked like that he was from somewhere from Asia, but she couldn’t tell exactly where.  Many tourists came to visit Jamaica from Asia, but most of them were girls; some men came to visit the country, but they were never alone.  They were either with their families or with their male friends.  It was rare that any man from that part of the world came to Jamaica alone; he made her a little curious.

She looked at him from above, thought for a second and called “Hey!”  He looked up and stopped.  She ran down to the street, stood in front of him and asked, “Where are you going?”  He answered, “Nowhere in particular.  I’m taking a walk.”  She asked if she could come along; she did this very often, and she usually did this confidently or her new friend, so to speak, asked her to come along before she asked.  But today, she felt a bit insecure because, according to her, she wasn’t dressed right.  The guy didn’t look sharp, but she knew instantly that he didn’t look sharp because he arrived in the island several hours ago.  She didn’t ask when he arrived but she knew because she met so many tourists before and she knew about them very well; how they looked when they arrived, how they looked when they were about to leave, how they looked after they spent a week or so in the island and many other things.  He looked a little surprised, but he let her come along.  She also made a couple of gestures to ask Julienne to come along.

She spent the next couple of hours with him.  At one point, he took off his glasses. He told her that he typically wore contact lens but he took a red eye flight to Jamaica; he wanted to get his eyes rested on his flight, so he wore glasses.  But, in the end, he could not get sleep well on his flight, so his eyes felt a little tired still; he explained that this was why he was wearing glasses.  She found that he was actually a handsome young man when he took off his glasses.  He looked a little stiff and pensive though.  She liked how he looked, but she was disappointed to find out that he was just a student and was not carrying a lot of money; he was going to a college in California and he was taking a little time off now.  She did not show her this disappointment on her face, but she thought “Ok, no yacht ride or scuba diving.”

Most men came to the island to party, and they were interested in any girls as long as they were physically attractive; if they met Mary Anne and Julienne, they always made eye contacts with both.  Julienne was very attractive on her own right and she often got more attention than Mary Anne.  But this guy seemed to be much more keen on Mary Anne.  Mary Anne, Julienne and he stopped at a couple of outdoor bars, though they didn’t order many drinks.  They also walked around the east side of Montego Bay.  At one point, she held his hands, and he did not resist.  Though he did have thick chest or big biceps, he had masculine hands; they were kind of hands that could hold her firmly.  After he held her hands long enough, he asked her to come back to his hotel; he was a little nervous because he was essentially asking her to sleep with her and he recognizably had not asked too many women something like that.  She was one of those women who could tell whether a man was a virgin or not just by looking at him and talking with him for a short while and she knew that he was not a virgin, but her experience told her that he was not exactly a very experimented man, either.  She generally preferred well experience men but she felt a little different about this one.  She casually answered “Ok.”; he looked relieved.

She sensed that Julienne felt a little left out tonight.  Julienne was attractive, but this guy didn’t seem to be interested in her though he was not ignoring Julienne intentionally.  Now that she was going to his hotel, Julienne didn’t know what to do.  She just told Julienne to go home; a little boring night for her, but she thought, “What else can she do?”

He took her to his hotel, but he apparently felt a little awkward to ask her to come straight to his room, so he first took her to the bar inside the hotel.  This was the first time that she entered this hotel, but she saw this hotel many times from outside; this looked like a budget hotel, and she confirmed it as she entered.  The bar didn’t look very pretty, either, though there was a pool right next to it; she had seen worse, but this was definitely not the nicest bar in Montego Bay.

The bar was completely empty.  He ordered a drink for her and he also got a drink for himself.  She sat beside the pool and he sat right next to her.  The bartender figured that this guy was a little inexperienced, so he decided to help him out; he just turned off the light in the bar, left only two of them and he left the bar to go home.  Ten minutes later, he managed to kiss her; he was ok, though he could definitely improve his techniques; he then took her up to his room where she spent the night.

She spent the next day and the day after with him.  And then she left.  She told him that she had a few things to do and she’d be back the next day.  She didn’t exactly lie; Julienne and she were invited to a party in Kingston a couple of weeks back.  Hosts were going to arrange a room for them to stay so that they could party until late night.  She thought about canceling this, but she wanted to go to a ‘real’ party.  She also missed Julienne, her best friend.  She also thought that her new boyfriend was going to leave the island in several days, so she couldn’t think of any reason why she should attach herself to him.  She asked her friend’s friend to give Julienne and her ride to Kingston.  He said fine and took them to the capital.

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The party was fun, but it dragged on for three days.  When Mary Anne came back to Montego Bay, she was not thinking about him at all; she assumed that he totally forgot about her, picked up another girl or left the island by then.  The day that she came back to Montego Bay, she stopped at a bar that she went to visit regularly; he was there.  She was a bit surprised because he was there to meet her, and he figured out that that was where she was going to show up that night somehow.  It turned out that he made a lot of effort to find her whereabouts for the last three days.  He found out where she lived somehow, and he even went to visit that place; she guessed that, given that he was not a local, he must have made a lot of effort.  After she spent about an hour chatting with him, she told him that she’d stop at his hotel later that night.  This time did she lie.  She knew that he was going to leave the island the next day; that was his flight schedule.  She was not looking to have any emotional attachment.

After he left for U.S., she spent her days in Montego Bay like she used to.  She met a couple of new men, though she strangely never met any men from U.S. or Europe.  One was from Brazil and the other was from South Africa.  Memory of her past men faded away as time passed, but she kept remembering about the guy that she met.  Then, one day, it suddenly occurred to her that he was different from anyone that she met in her life.  He genuinely believed in the idea of hope and dream; he believed that there were wonderful things like love, romance and beauty in this world.  In the end, he had a false sense of love toward her, but he developed that feeling because he believed that love, romance and beauty were not figments of imagination.  That was one thing about him very different from those that she met in life up to then.  He was not a saint, but he was pure as a human.  In the end, he was just playing with her, though he believed otherwise because of his naiveté; he was going to remember about her less and less, and in a couple of months, he would look for another girl; he might even believe that the new girl would be the love of his life because he would still be rather naïve then.  But she knew that he would still believe that the world was a fine place; he was not cynical.  He was not a man of optimism, but she knew that he would always hold onto the idea of hope and dream.  She did not intend to become a different woman now, but she wanted to make, having ‘hopes’ and ‘dreams’, a part of her.  That moment did she decide that she would leave the island someday; there was not much else left for her to do in the island.  Many said that it was a beautiful island; she did not disagree, but to her, the island was a place that she could not believe in the idea of hope and dream.  That was why she decided to leave.

3. New York City

Though something in Mary Anne had changed forever, she didn’t start acting like a different person all of a sudden.  Besides having a good look, she also had great tactical skills; she never committed crimes, but she did not mind using other people, in particular, men’s money, power and connections, to get what she wanted and that was exactly what she did next.  She used the next man that she met and she asked him to take her to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica and spend time together.  If she wanted to do something in her life, Montego Bay was not the place; Kingston was the happening place, and it was also the place where she could figure out how to get out of the island.  Once she arrived in Kingston, she made excuses like she wanted to go see her old friend, she wanted to go see her aunt and she just wanted to spend a couple of hours alone, and managed to make time for her alone during the day.  She stopped at a couple of model agencies, and she got lucky.  One agency was just looking for a model looking like her.  She was hired on the spot.  Once she got the job, she told her man to give her some money for shopping; she never asked a lot of money straightforwardly before, but she needed it this time, so she asked.  She did that very well and he just gave her a thousand dollars; he had to stop at a couple of places to get the money in cash, but he didn’t seem to mind.  She just kept the money and waited for him to leave for U.S.  Once he left, she used the money to rent an apartment for herself and started working as a model; the apartment was a small apartment, but it was sufficient.  After she worked as a model for six months in Kingston, she got a big break.  The model agency asked her to fly to New York and stay for a couple of weeks there for photo shoots for a new apparel brand.  She said, “Yes.”  The agency managed to get her the passport and a temporary work visa.  As far as she was concerned, that temporary work visa was as good as U.S. permanent residency.  She arrived in New York, stayed at a hotel and worked for a couple of weeks as planned so that there wouldn’t be any hard feelings between her agency and her; after the photo shoots, she skipped the flight back to Jamaica.  She had some money saved for this occasion, and she also did some homework before she left Jamaica.  She contacted a couple of people and found a connection in New York.  Her friend’s uncle owned a small restaurant in Queens.  She obtained the address before she left, and right after the photo shoots, she went straight to the restaurant.  Her friend’s uncle, the owner of the restaurant, was not hiring any new waitresses, but he understood that she needed a job.  He gave the job of waitress and he also arranged a room for her.  In a couple of weeks, she got to know several people; one of them was Mary Parker.  She borrowed her credit card, ATM card and went to a bank.  She told a banker that she married recently and that was why her IDs had a different last name “Parker”.  She also told that she decided to not to add her middle name “Anne” when he made her credit card and ATM card but she just wanted to add that this time.  She also made up her social security number but the banker didn’t bother to verify.  The banker felt a little uneasy but he just opened an account for her because, the more accounts he opened, the faster he would get promoted.  Mary Anne knew that; she also smiled pleasantly.  The banker gave her a new bank account number and a personal check the same day.  In time, she got herself her own credit card and ATM card.  With those two and the fake social security number, she got a job at a clothes store several months later; the store manager didn’t bother checking her passport or her visa.  She was on a proper payroll this time, and she got herself a tax paper within a year.  Now did she have three different IDs, the credit card, ATM card and the tax paper; she also had the social security number.  The social security number was a fake, but it worked; she appreciated the faulty ID system in U.S. because that was why she was able to make up something like a social security number so easily.  She started going to a driving school, and she got herself a New York Driver License three months later.  She looked just like a U.S. citizen with that.  In U.S., the driver license was the ultimate ID, not the passport or the green card.  But she wanted more; she could stay in U.S. as long as she wanted with the driver license, but she wanted to see the world.  She used her charm and found a guy to marry her six months after she got the license.  Once she got married, she told her new husband how she got her New York Driver License and that her social security number was just a made up number.  He did not get upset about it; there were many others like her in New York, and his new wife happened to be one of them.  He arranged an immigration lawyer for her to sort it out, and the matter was sorted out within a year.  Since he was a U.S. citizen, Mary Anne Rose became a U.S. permanent resident three years later.

Mary Anne got what she wanted, but her marriage had no passion at that point.  Though her husband was not having an affair, she knew that he was genuinely interested in the office manager at his office; she met her once, and she was fairly attractive.  She was a genuinely nice person, and she could tell that Roy, her husband and she were attracted to each other; they seemed like they were made for each other.  Mary Anne casually suggested that Roy and she get divorced; Roy did not get emotional about it and he just took care of all paperwork to get that done timely.  He felt a little sadness, but he also knew that the marriage was over.  He also knew that the marriage was really for Mary Anne to get U.S. permanent residency legally; she got it, so he decided to move on.  He thought, “If nothing else, I gave her a new life.”

4. Finishing Mocha

Mary Anne’s divorce was finalized four months ago.  Funny thing was that she felt like a proud U.S. permanent resident now.  She essentially came to U.S. as an illegal immigrant; she found a way to stay in the country nonetheless.  But she didn’t steal or cheat for the most part; she worked and made her living honestly for the most part.  She also experienced one divorce now just like many other fellow U.S. permanent residents.  She felt that she belonged to the country.

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Soon after the divorce, she decided to get a very different job from ones that she had in the past.  She had jobs like waiting for tables, making drinks as a bartender and selling cheap t-shirts and jeans at clothes stores.  She decided to become a Ballroom Dance instructor this time.  Getting this job was not very difficult; most Ballroom Dance studios gladly took beginners.  Being under 30 and good looking definitely helped; Ballroom Dance studios preferred young and good-looking employees because that really helped the business.  They just paid the minimum wage to new employees and passed out training videos to them.  Those who were good at dancing picked up Ballroom Dance fairly quickly and they generally grew to become good instructors; those who could not become good at Ballroom Dance quickly enough were more or less forced to leave.  She was good at dancing before she came to New York; she was pretty athletic, too.  After she came to New York, she took two dance classes a week on average to keep in shape; she took dance classes like Jazz, Modern and Hip hop.  When she decided to become a Ballroom Dance instructor, she had a very good foundation already.  Her training program ended in two months; she kept practicing diligently, and she got quite good at Ballroom Dance given that she only spent four months so far.  At the beginning, she was only making the minimum wage, but the pay structure was that she got commissions as she gave private dance lessons to students.  Though she could improve Ballroom dancing skills still, she used her charm to get three students to take her private dance lessons from her.  A lawyer, a chiropractor and an engineer turned engineering consultant.  Each of them only took a couple of private dance lessons a week, so she was still not making a lot of money, but she could see that she would be doing quite well financially a year from now.  She would definitely be so much better at Ballroom Dance, too; she would probably get a couple of more students and she would also teach more private dance lessons to her current students.  They were all unattractive middle age men, but they all made good money; they could pay a lot more if they wanted to.  She was still very attractive physically; she could continue using her charm for some years.

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