Desmond Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
1958
The North is still with him. It has been three weeks since Agent Armstrong's basement encounter with the individual that he'd been tracking, the one that had been known to him as the Star Woman. Out of all of her various identities this had been the one name that he had fixed upon, with it's implied way finder symbolism, a point to which he could track her in his mind... But upon their first and only meeting she had given him what he believed in his heart to be her only true name. She was, she is the North - and she has come to be with him even more over this passage of time, like a smell in his clothes that grows stronger as though she herself has been wearing them, or a ringing of tinnitus in his ears that he hears all the louder every time he thinks of it, of her. He feels The North settling slowly into his very bones, and his very bones are already restless enough to begin with, trapped up here at this Agency Facility deep in the Muskoka woods.
Agent Armstrong is sitting, alone, in a comfortable wicker armchair next to a large bay window fronting the south east corner of the Facility. He glances out the window and takes in the view: rolling vistas of pine and birch against the sloping grey rock of the Canadian Shield, all leading down to the glistening waters of a vast series of meandering lakes. The serene beauty of the landscape sickens the Agent, as does the comfort of his chair, the warmth of the sunshine streaming in through the window, and the calm, gentle manner of the helpful staff that flit past him.
The Facility is ostensibly a place for R&R, for Agents that have undergone particularly strenuous actions in the field... But of course he knows the real purpose of his stay here. He is here to be observed, to be managed, like a risk. He is here because of the potential security breach that he represents.
He tries not to think of the fate of the other men on his crew. This also causes Armstrong no small measure of disgust, this time with himself. Those were his men, his responsibility, but no matter how much he asked what had happened to them there was no real answer forthcoming, just that they were being taken care of, not to worry. Not to worry...
Armstrong supposes he can take some comfort in that he must still be considered an asset to the Agency, or why else would they go through the expense of housing him here? If he were only a liability they would have done away with him already. But he knows that with the Agency there is always more going on than meets the eye, and what is really bothering him now is the fact that so far he has been required to file only one Incident Report. That and only one interview, a short and simple one with a man whom he had never met before and whose rank had never been mentioned – no real surprise, there – but now as Armstrong sits here, warming beneath the rays of the mid afternoon sun, he can't for the life of himself seem to recall either the man's name, or for that matter, even what his face had looked like. And for a man in Armstrong's profession this is a disturbing realization, indeed.
Nondescript, Armstrong supposes. A plain ordinary face. Glasses? Yeah, sure... Andrew? Anthony? He had a pen... He had tapped the pen against his chin. And the one question that he kept asking the most:
How did it make you feel?
Armstrong shifts uncomfortably in his comfortable wicker chair. He had done his best to answer, had explained that as the events had unfolded he had always maintained an awareness that the subject (the NORTH) was somehow creating a form of hallucination, albeit a very convincing one, to be sure. He had described the symptoms he had experienced, the physical sensations and sense of disorientation. He had even gone so far as to speculate as to which psychotropic elements may have been at use there in that basement room, three weeks ago. Because that was what they had been investigating after all, he had explained. A group that used hallucinogens, combined with auto suggestion and various other techniques and technologies, for subversive and destabilizing effect. And then, with all the tact he could muster, Armstrong had asked, for what felt like the thousandth time, what had happened to his men. Not to worry, was the response. Everyone is being well cared for, same as you...
And the man – Lewis? Larry? - had cooly sat back with his pen and made some notes and they had talked some more, they had talked until the conversation came back to that same question, how did it make Armstrong feel? And Armstrong had done his best to address that question, but of course he had known damn well not to really answer it, not to say how he really felt, how he has always felt about this entire investigation since it's early days, going all the way back to the Roberts couple.
How Armstrong really feels is like a rat in a cage, a mouse in a maze. And the morning that he and his crew had ventured down those stairs into that room of twisted madness, he had felt like the mouse that stumbles around the corner of the maze to discover that the cheese has turned into a cat, a giant feral beast that looms over him with fangs and claws fully extended, her eyes glittering bright with slits for pupils and her breath stinking hot like an oven ready to cook him alive. The North is with him and she is all the time he will ever know. He is an experiment and the North is the laboratory of his mind. She licks his brain with a hairy tongue of stinking fire. Her tongue has set this putrid blaze over his sight, twisting his eyes into twin balls of flame that produce seed for his brain to fire into space, through the North and into space past the stars, past the Outer Darkness, through the North to a burning blackness darker than dark and blacker than black-
“Agent Armstrong?”
Armstrong looks up, slowly. Before him stands one of the assistants, a slight young woman with brown hair and narrow rimless glasses. Audrey, her name is, he can remember her name well enough. Audrey stands with a clipboard pressed tightly to her chest as if to protect herself from the thoughts that he's just been having. She presses her lips into a nervous smile for a moment, and then she continues to speak to him.
“Excuse me, Agent, but the Director would like to meet with you at the Main Office.”
Armstrong blinks. The Director? Here? He looks out the window for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts, then leans forward and half stumbles to his feet. Audrey steps forward and raises a tentative hand, and her fingertips skitter like small branches along his shoulder blades. “Easy, sir, there's no rush...” She says, and as he steadies himself she moves her hand quickly away, back to her clipboard. Armstrong looks up and meets her eyes. For a moment the two of them just stare at each other, both of them thoughtless in their private fears. There is an almost senseless presence that occupies this moment, like a vacuum of the spirit, broadening the space between them. Something terrible; alien and alone.
And then Armstrong manages to pull himself together, rising to his feet. The assistant steps back and doesn't offer to help, looking away instead.
“Okay,” Armstrong says, “Let's go.”
“Right this way, sir.” She turns on a wavering heel and leads Armstrong out of the sunroom and into a long, grey corridor. She walks furtively ahead of him, here crepe sole shoes slapping lightly on the linoleum floor, Armstrong's footsteps soundless and smooth. A security guard at the end of the hallway unlocks a door and silently lets them both through. The guard looks past Armstrong as he passes by, seeming oblivious to his presence.
In this next hallway the walls are painted a slightly darker shade of grey, a subtle indication of the changes in power being traversed as they approach the Director's office. Armstrong tries to recall the details of his last meeting with the Director. It had been over two years ago, and it had been rather short and to the point.
The Director had been sitting behind his desk at the time, preoccupied with several files before him, and had gestured Armstrong into a chair. What had followed was the briefest of briefings – a summary of Armstrong's assignment – facilitating the Roberts experiment, and monitoring the subversive group. Then he had asked if Armstrong had any questions. Armstrong had known better than to ask anything; the details would be made available to his office as it was determined that he needed them. With a wave of the hand the Director had seen him off, and the only thing of memorable note was that not once had the Director looked up from the files he had been perusing.
Armstrong brings the image of the Director's face into his mind. A diminutive, rather florid man, with a face that seemed a bit large for his head. Reddish folds of flesh around small eyes framed by large spectacles, and a high forehead topped by a widows peak of shiny black hair. Delicate fingers, he can recall, seeming to dance lightly as the Director waved his dismissal. A deceptively effeminate and slight demeanour... Armstrong had often wondered how many people had misread this, during the Director's rise to power. Those eyes had stayed on the pages before him, and Armstrong can recall feeling a sense of relief that the Director had never turned his gaze upwards, had never looked directly, as it were, at Armstrong's face.
And now they have reached the end of this darker, longer hallway, and through a surprisingly open and unguarded doorway, the assistant leads Armstrong into, of all things, a large interior garden. She looks over her shoulder and smiles lightly at him, as they make their way along a cobblestone path between banks of ferns and eucalyptus trees, rock gardens and flowing streams of gurgling water. The sun shines brightly through the glass walls, blinking between the leaves as they move through the flowering green space. Armstrong cranes his head upwards and sees the sides of the glass dome meeting thirty metres above his head. Small birds pinwheel against the bright sky. They walk past stone carvings and more plants of such variety that Armstrong gives up trying to name them in his mind. The pungent smell of earth and water and greenery fills his nostrils and makes his head go light.
The Director is waiting for them on a small wooden bridge, that spans the main stream, a tributary that seems to enter the garden space from outside the walls, and exits out the other end, rejoining the larger wilderness. Armstrong and the Assistant approach tentatively, as though before a wild animal, like a deer or a landed bird of some kind. The Director is half sitting, half leaning on one of the railings, something that a person of his size would not normally be able to do, but this is a small bridge, and the railings are not very tall. It is a rather incongruous pose for a man of the Director's position to be taking, but what seems to remain in character is the way the he is not looking at either of them, gazing into the waters of the stream below, as he begins to speak.
“There is a theory,” the Director says, his voice low and remote in the brightly moving space, “That the Christian myth of Creation – Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden – is in fact a biological imprint, a genetic memory passed down to us over the eons...”
Armstrong blinked. Christian... myth? He had never really placed much importance on religion in his life, but he had also known better than to speak against it. That was the sort of thing that closed a lot of doors, associated one with all the wrong sort of people. To hear such talk now, under these circumstances, was unsettling to say the least.
The Director smiles absently, still observing the waters beneath, as he continues. “This theory points out a seeming aberration present in the Book of Genesis. In this book it is mentioned that God created Man and Woman at the same time, and then later in the story, God creates first Adam, and then, as a companion for Adam, God creates Eve from one of Adam's ribs.” And now the Director lifts his gaze upwards from the stream, and turns to look directly at Armstrong. “This is quite clearly stated. God created both Man and Woman, together, before He created either Adam or Eve.”
The Director's eyes have Armstrong locked in place, rooting his feet into the soil beneath him. And Armstrong feels a sense of familiarity, as he looks straight into the Director's eyes for the first time. He has seen those eyes somewhere before...
“Do you see what this implies? If one is to understand the Genesis fable for what it is - a coding of our own evolutionary processes - then what we have here is a record showing that humanity originated as an entity of both genders, present in a single, perfect being. A hermaphrodite.”
Armstrong recoils at the mention of this word. During his training he had been educated as to the existence of such individuals, had even seen the photos taken in hospitals and labs, in cages and in morgues. These represented some sort of genetic mutation, freaks of nature, not the original state of humanity itself. He wants to express his disgust, wondering if this is some sort of test, but finds himself unable to form any words at just this moment. The garden stirs lightly around the Director's absolutely motionless eyes.
“What it must have been like,” the Director whispers, “To have been so... complete.”
Then the Director releases Armstrong from his stare and looks away, up through the trees and towards the sky. Armstrong shifts his feet, testing his newfound sense of... freedom? He turns to look at the assistant, only to find that she is gone. Slipped away, into the shadows of the garden... He looks back at the Director and tries to remain calm.
The Director speaks up to the blue sky above. “Of course this would have been at a point when we were no more than a single cell organism. But you see how the analogy fits. A single cell – one being, one gender. The cellular walls forming a sort of garden, a microcosm within which all of the possibilities of Life itself exist as one. A Zygote, self fertilized in a state of perpetual bliss.” The Director lowers his face from the sky. “And of course, Nature insists Her principles upon this state, and applying the simplest form of geometric force, sets all possibilities onto the path of their eventual realization. The cell divides into two – the first separation; Adam's rib, transformed into Eve. However, since this took place within it's own cellular walls, this First Division could have remained this way in perpetuity, had Nature not once again moved against Perfection.
“She introduces a Virus, which then penetrates the cellular wall – the Serpent, offering the fruit of knowledge. This disrupts the stasis of duality, and causes the cells to now multiply continuously, past the walls of the Original Cell. “ The Director smiles, sadly.
“Exile from the Garden.”
And now the Director is lifting his weight off of the railing, and he has once again turned his attention back towards Armstrong. He extends his short arms outwards, and his rubbery face stretches into a grim smile. “And so begins a tragic, painful, terrible process of Life moving outward away from itself, of division and multiplication and the inevitable alienation that it produces within the very Soul of Reality itself.” The Director begins to step forward, towards Armstrong. His feet are small and produce a light tapping sound against the floorboards of the bridge. “A process that for all of it's terror cannot be denied it's beauty, cannot be ignored for the wonders that it produces.”
Armstrong wants to back away from the Director. Something is wrong here, something is very wrong... He thinks he knows where else he has met the Director before, where he has looked into those eyes before. But he doesn't want to admit this to himself, to face the reality that is slowly walking towards him. He just wants to run away. He doesn't know where, just turn around and start running and keep running. Forever. Instead he finds himself holding his ground; or rather, he finds himself frozen in place, unable to move.
The Director steps off the lip of the bridge and onto the cobblestone path. His arms are still held outward at his sides, and his smile has smoothed into an expression of angelic bliss. A distinct smell hits Armstrong as the Director approaches him, a sweaty animal smell, tinged with blood and dirt. The air seems to thicken before the Director, vibrating at such a continuously lowering frequency... lowering into the earth. So as to be of the dead. His voice softly spins out like filaments of silk, touching lightly against Armstrong's mind. “This is the way of the world, the need to break away and grow to our fullest maturity and potential. And we have been growing away from each other for such a very long time...
“But now.” The Director says, stepping up to Armstrong, only a few feet between them, the gap closing, closing.. “Now the time has come for us to return to ourselves, to the original cell.”
Armstrong has to stifle an impulse that wells up suddenly within him, and even as he does he is unsure whether it's the urge to laugh or the urge to gag, or both. For now that the Director has drawn so close to him, now that he can see directly(!) into the little man's beady squinting eyes, now Armstrong realizes, he knows. He can see with utter clarity, where he has met this individual before, and this realization fills him with such sickening hilarity, that he feels that he could laugh out the vomit of his mind until it heaves dry and hollow as a ragged, rusted lobotomy, a sprayed out cage waiting for it's next prisoner. Another brain for the trap.
And his thoughts are not his own now, his mind is a prison within the eyes of the one who stares into his eyes. Seven eyes for his mind. Armstrong. Who is Armstrong? A sentence for the skinless; how many deeds that reveal urges? to downward spin / to lick and eat; to juice and spine, and Brain. Sacred Brain. That sweet taste of Slave Brain bursting from my teeth. My blood, the blood of my teeth.
With the Director's hand, the North reaches up and cups Armstrong's quivering cheek. She weeps a single tear and leans up onto tiptoes to whisper into his ear. She speaks his name, his First Name, and welcomes him Home.
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