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This section consists of the Holiday Inn tape, plus a letter from Lisa “explaining” how it got recorded over. I’ll provide links below.

I received the undated letter in the summer of 2004, around the time of my trip to the States wherein I visited Cusack’s company and hovered on the brink of losing my mind at the Stanford particle accelerator. This was about six months after the taping incident. The letter is not only a study of sociopathic deception, but a way of explaining my own behavior/weaknesses.

The letter also sums up the reasons why I almost lost my mind.

Here’s how it went that day: I set the recorder in my bag and went out for food and wine. When I leave at 1:36 minutes into it you’ll just hear the ambient sounds of Lisa in the room by herself (a cough now and then), then suddenly at 6:09 minutes in there’s a click and then you hear different ambient sounds – mainly the sound of the wind. As Lisa herself verifies in the Marc letter, this was the next day, when I was at the dentist. We know this because the wind came up overnight – there is no wind sound at the beginning of the tape, when Lisa and I are talking or when Lisa is alone in the room.

So the tape was recorded over the next day, in the Holiday Inn room, while I was at the dentist; zero doubt about that.  (There was no wind sound anywhere else, like at the Balmoral, where we moved to, so her theory that the tape got recorded over there is not remotely possible.)

All you really need do to know Lisa recorded over the tape is to listen to it up until there’s a click and the sound of the wind kicks in, which is 6:09 minutes in — you can move the thingee at the bottom until the time on the right bottom of the screen is a bit over 6 minutes. (My description of the incident is in Part Four, Chapter Six, page 257.)

OK, here's the mp3 file. Click the > button on the left to play it (requires Flash and a reasonably fast internet connection):

[coolplayer] http://cygawa.aweisbecker.com/contents/holidayinn.mp3 [/coolplayer]

Back? Okay. The letter: The first few pages is Lisa’s “explanation” of an incident that’s only mentioned briefly in the book – I omitted the long version as “overkill.” You can Click here for its description in the Marc letter .  (This was when I hired the guy to shadow Lisa and he showed up with a newly broken leg.) But I urge you to come back to this (if you’re interested). Lisa’s explanation of the condition of the tape is our current interest. Lisa’s “explanation” of the tape incident starts on page four of the eight page letter. Again, it’s best if you directly go to that page of the letter and return to the first few pages later, if you’re interested.

Click here to go to Lisa’s letter (among other things) explaining the condition of the tape.

Back? Regarding the letter: You must understand that it is merely one of dozens of similar ilk; I single it out because of Lisa’s “explanation” of the condition of the Holiday Inn tape – including one of her many diagrams; in this case of the tape recorder.

If you first listen to the tape you should be able to see her explanation for what it is: Pure and transparent deception, i.e., “Perception management,” i.e., gaslighting. (Just one example: Lisa does not mention the clear sound of the wind on the recorded-over section of the tape — which could only have happened at the Holiday Inn room, and while I was at the dentist. She would have been better off with her original alternate explanation that "the maid did it.")

In the morbid sense, Lisa’s explanation is laughable, no?

What’s not laughable is the effect of this letter (plus the dozens of other similar ones) on me.

How to explain?

On the level of fact/logic/probability (and especially armed as we are with knowledge of subsequent events) the letter is absolutely transparent lies. We can see the gaslighting for what it is; not only the explanation itself but the relentlessness of her assurances of love and devotion – eight single spaced pages.

But if you were just to read the letter without knowing the context, you might say to yourself something like this: "That poor woman is so in love! What’s with this paranoid guy?! Why doesn’t she dump him?”

And indeed, almost everyone subjected to Lisa’s gaslighting believed her version of the taping incident, and our relationship. (Amy’s theory that an embarrassing fart prompted Lisa to record over the tape is a good example.) This in itself is instructive, meaning in the larger sense: Why people believe untruths; why the world is so fucked up. (That we are all subjected to the same sort of perception management by the people who run this world is a subject I will deal with elsewhere.)

A related matter: Do you see how this sort of thing – the daily letters, love notes, sexy post-its, customized screen savers, poems in the margins of books I may get around to reading, plus multiple-daily emails when we were apart, and on and on and on… Do you see that the endless assurances of love and devotion and protestations of innocence could get to me? Instill doubt about my own perceptions? How the Malevolent Gods Toying With Us Theory could creep back into my consciousness even after all the incidents, too numerous to even list let alone describe here?

How could anyone be that way, let alone the love of your life?

Do you see why around the time of this letter I almost lost my mind?

I don’t know how many hundreds of hours Lisa spent composing letters (etc.) like this one, but I find the image of her bent over her computer (or writing longhand in her notebook), deep in concentration, concocting all this… I find it… frightening.

What was going on in her mind?

Cutting to the ending, the Esteban Mora business: Do you see how someone capable of this – again, visualize the hours spent in deceiving me, the “love of her life,” trying to make me (plus my friends) think I’m insane — would have no compunctions about trying to see to my assassination, to prevent the exposure of what she is? (Given that there would be no risk to herself – she need only perception manage another sociopath.)

I very much hope you see how frightening that letter is.

One in 25 people on this planet are like Lisa.