Free Away From Everywhere by Chad Pelley Page A

been working on the story for weeks now, and his employer was expecting a final draft.
    Their neighbour at the time was a seventy-eight-year-old widow named Elsie. She was so innocent, so bored with life, that she made pies and cookies for Owen and Alex on a regular basis. Dropping them over, and coming back for the Tupperware, was an excuse for social interaction.
    His mother burst back into the porch, dragging their father by the shoulder like a misbehaving kid. The door bounced off the wall and hit their father as they came back into the house. The black nylon of his jacket was balled up in her hand. Owen listened in on his parents from the hallway and heard his mother shove their father down onto the couch. She was standing above him, arms folded, waiting for an explanation. They were yelling, then calm, and then yelling. Owen and Alex hid in the bathroom when they heard their parents coming down the hall towards their father’s office.
    That very night his father shifted from hiding his theories to trying to justify them. He “admitted” that the pizza fliers being delivered to their mailbox were coded, that his supposed employer was leaving them there. He showed her the “codes,” a drawer full of pizza fliers with certain letters underlined to spell out a hidden message. Among the lines of the flyer in his hand, E AT AT SA L’S TON I GHT. E AT S MART. T RY OUR R E A L S ICILIAN CURED H AM. The underlined letters spelled Elsie’sTrash. What frightened them the most was the four letters underlined in the next sentence: TA K E I N A L ITTLE SICI L Y TONIGHT ! He assured them he wasn’t there to kill her.
    â€œI’m just the journalist, Claire, don’t worry. Anything that serious would be left to other agencies, not the journalist division. I really don’t understand what the kill code means, but it is not an instruction for me, and we are not in any real danger unless you blow this out of proportion and–”
    â€œRoger, please! Think about it. Where are the paycheques from this company?Where is the goddamn magazine ?What is it called and where can I buy–”
    â€œIt’s not that kind of magazine,Claire. It doesn’t need a title, because–”
    â€œ Roger! C’mon. You’re smarter than this.” Screeching now, her words ripping out of her throat. “How can you be selling a magazine with no goddamn name?”
    He sat there so calm, so unaffected by her emotions. “It’s not that kind of magazine. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll find mixed in with trashy celebrity magazines in a grocery store checkout. And it’s only being distributed underground to an elite audience, for now.”

    His father spent three months in a psychiatric ward on medication, getting therapy from a young and gifted specialist in schizophrenia. Dr. Erickson managed to convince him that the magazine was all a delusion. At first, Owen’s father thought the doctor was just trying to censor and sabotage his magazine by locking away all of its contributors, but the doctor was crafty enough to convince him otherwise. The drugs helped, once they settled on the right pill, CPZ, and a dosage that didn’t make him twitch or slur his speech too badly. The doctor recognized that Roger was an intelligent man and used a lot of logic in his therapy. One day he took him to Elsie’s garbage cans and let him go through them. He took him inside Elsie’s house to meet Elsie and let him root around until he was satisfied it was just some old lady’s house. He showed him that everyone on the street was receiving those fliers and took him to meet the men who published the fliers. With a lot of therapy, and CPZ,Dr. Erickson brought Owen’s father back to reality.
    In November, his mother signed all the necessary papers to get him out. He convinced her he could control his disorder with the CPZ and cognitive therapy. He could convince