Andrey Astray: A Chronicle of the Calls
Author: Jason Page · Published: 19 Sep 2026
In Chicago they called him Speedy. Andrey Price was an artist with a research binder on everything: economics, quantum mechanics, psychotronics, the architecture of power. Most people treated the binder the way they treated him, with polite dismissal. The author, Jason Page did not. They had met through Occupy Chicago. They cooked. They talked until neither of them was sure how they had arrived.
Andrey Astray is the record of the telephone: the calls Jason kept between February 2016 and March 2017, from a McDonald’s in Uptown to a library in Los Angeles. The spoken lines that came out of the handset.
The year walks from five dollars and a Filet-O-Fish to a typewriter ribbon that will not ink, an apartment cleaned for company and then destroyed because the walls were listening, a law the detectives who did not like but had to follow, no beds, a closed missing person's report, a Powerade and a sandwich on Highway 70 West, and a man teaching himself math so he could build a spacecraft. The institutions had a script. He was over eighteen, polite, walking, not on his medicine. Seeing was not holding.
A documentary chronicle drawn from 273 recordings, written to stand with For Speedy: Stories of Compassion, Conspiracy and Psychosis (2nd edition). That book is the people. This one is the phone.
Dialogue reconstructed from two-way calls the machine could not label; names restored when the record is sure.
A last chapter that does not pretend the story ended on the tape: Andrey’s Law, a proposed act of Congress named for the gap the calls keep running into.
Andrey was last seen at his usual places on March 23, 2017. He blocked everyone. Seven years of silence followed. In June of 2024 he was found unresponsive in an alley in Culver City. He was thirty-one.
The light he carried is still in the work. Andrey Astray is for anyone who has called and been told there is nothing to be done; for families and friends of adults whose illness arrived after the birthday on which the state decided they were old enough to refuse; and for readers who want the year as it sounded, before the detectives, before Highway 70, before Area 51 became a destination.
Prepared by Jason Page. Chicago, 2026.
