++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
AGE OF INNOCENCE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
'"You see that elegant young man going into that fine, peaceful house: his name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, or something. A woman dedicated herself to loving this spiteful fool: she is dead, she is certainly a saint in heaven, now. You will kill me as he killed that woman. That is the fate of us charitable hearts...'"
A Season In Hell - Arthur Rimbaud
...Across the pain-jerked body of the Night
We must go, taking the new-born Death in arms,
Holding it close, warmly to us, as our own,
Giving it new games to play, new toys to tear apart.
Tunisian Patrol - Richard Spender
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Crestfallen]
He had come over the last dune and felt the vibrations of her presence across the wide emptiness. For once there was a sense of disruption to what had merely been an eternity of sand, fire and air. He judged that they were going somewhere this time - no longer the sightseeing of obscure days, years? (He hadn't counted the wild leaps of the blazing satellite, that he called a sun but probably wasn't). He had once, as he had suspected that it was all a by-product of a mind swollen and numbed in trauma. That had passed, now he simply accepted that he didn't really know anything anymore.
That was why, when he stood there, on the sands of his time, on the shore of his memory - and knew she was coming for him, and knew what an insane quest that was - his heart broke a thousandfold, right there within his chest. Jeffrey Spender was dead. Long live Jeffrey Franklin Spender.
The dusty air tore at his skin and his soul relinquished a tear to the ionized fingers of the coming storm. The wind flapped around him, and, despite its great height above them both, the awesome satellite passed into impossible darkness. Night descended and over the sharp endless rise of sand, a moon danced sublime; the earth cooling to a premature midnight as his companion and he passed into a cave on the frontier. A cave in the middle of nowhere, like an oasis in the middle of hell.
The Companion had been with him from the beginning. He had called her then the Whore of Death. Men had seen her in war on the battlefield and to embrace her was to fall, her kiss was death. She had entered like a dementia, the solid halls of his reality, the squalid horror of the basement, *the* solitary figure in the room after his departed father: the man who had unquestioningly put his own weapon to his head and fired, speaking words of 'honour'.
With her crazed, violet eyes and her dark lips, she had squatted over his bloody prostrate form and brought her tongue over his lips but once. Before his body, locking in seizure, had thrown him here. In limbo, where he was permitted to journey across the blazing sand to all places, and all things. To the beginning and the end.
His eyes had gone blind for a moment against the preternatural daylight and she had put out a hand to steady him from falling into the steep, white drop below - a backdrop of endless desert nothing. He had mistaken the black material whirling around her for crow-coloured wings at first. The strands of her hair sucked in light, as they tore at the sky in a mad arc behind her - yet he couldn't see her face. He was borne into a fiery pit with confusion, disaster - helpless and half-blind. She had taken his defeated body up in her arms and swathed him, swathed him in strange cloth - he heard it flapping errantly in the updraught. He was lifted again and carried.
How bizarre it had all seemed. That they had passed the stray columns of a long abandoned city and disappeared below into someone's crypt. Below the whipping of the sand above. He hadn't seen the sun set, but he knew that it had.
In the darkness, a candle lamp was lit to consume the shadow and throw light across his companion's face. She, who took down the hooded shroud and revealed herself. He beheld the face of his amethyst-eyed, former partner, Diana Fowley. A bitter laugh had risen in his chest but got stuck, only growling ominously like a cough. He was truly in the land of the mad. What dreams are these, Jeffrey? The ravings of a mad man.
But the voice that came from Diana soon sobered him. It sang the song eternal, the primal rumblings of the heavens. It was the permanent ending of all, that the seraphs would, in flights against the stars, use to split the planets.
"You have been permitted," the voice imploded, "to see all things."
He was not afraid to speak:
"Why?"
It was his own voice that scared him, its timbre, new and rich and strong. It was the strength he feared, the unbearable will to carry on. But this was not to be a conversation, and unlike the man he had been before, while he could laugh at the absurdity of what he now saw, he did not fear it. His acceptance passed into grace. He rose, a spirit on gossamer wings, soaring the flames of understanding, singeing his wings, falling, triumphing nonetheless. He knew he had to fall to rise again from the depths.
Diana, with her eyes as mad as moonlight, touched him with a glacial hand. The lids of his eyes on fire.
"Look." she said.
And he saw.
* * *
They came and moved him in the night. Stole him away like common thieves. He had been in a hospital - the kind that free men use and bring their children with the lacerated limbs, the women with the first tremors of labour, their best friends with the accidents that shouldn't have happened. *He* was not meant to be there - and no record of him ever having been would be recovered.
What stubborn vagaries of chance and irony determined he dare to live, without a prayer of regaining conscious independent thought? That he was lucky, or that he was a Spender? Who took bullets in their sleep and got up and walked like the dead men they were. His father had been here too - a 'murdered' man, bleeding into the carpet. The photograph, a crime scene curio. A picture of Samantha and Fox Mulder. Not of Jeffrey and Cassandra Spender. He smiled that the old man had at least a heart to be blown out of him. A man who had never been honoured had not the sentiment to betray. Yet, like his father before him, he refused to die.
But 'they' would see about that. His body hurtling through space, under the screaming siren of an ambulance - an ambulance that, like him, was going to disappear. The only surprise was that she was there with him: his Lili, his lily of the morning. The one, who in haste and heat and uncertainty, he had loved. He alone had seen the mad, desperate fear that had risen, like blood, to her face and vanished just as quickly. She moved as silently and stealthily as did her partner - on orders. Except, that beneath the cloak of conspirital authority she had harboured for some time a dagger of hard, silent perfidy. The hour of her insurrection was nigh, and from there, there was little to come back to. He knew. Behold! his broken body.
No state line had yet been crossed before his body was transferred into an unmarked van. The ambulance abandoned. The secrecy secured. Lili never left him, she and another called, Vansen, were to deliver him - for the last time - unto the tender audience of his father. And all the time she drove, her black uniform making her unequivocally pale in the dark recesses of the seat, her spine was fused with fear - for him - that she had come all this way just to watch him die. This time, not only he had noticed the harsh resolution of her gaze when, she, Vansen and the two others had settled him into the back. She had expected only a driver, not two. Maybe Old Smoky didn't trust her as entirely as she'd hoped. And while she might explain killing one, two would so surely sign her betrayal that she might as well load those two bullets into the back of her own skull.
But that didn't stop her thinking about it. All the way there. Vansen looked at her again once. He had an inkling that she was going to turn but that was all.
He was taken, of all places, to a sanatorium for the criminally insane. It was really a front for what had been the site of various experiments on random Americans unfortunate enough to be there. Experiments on the effect of attenuated strains of the alien 'black oil' virus. Given enough time, everyone grew murderous or really did go mad. Or both. He was put in a room, still machine supported. Until the great man himself would deign to see him. Lili was posted outside.
He watched her in the hall. She was silent, her back to the door. He sensed the speechless desperation though no one else would have. Why was he so important to her? They had only spent one night together, hadn't they? And they had decided that it go no further than that. Then why was she here? He was out of the loop. What was he missing? Her lips moved in a slight tremor, like she was talking to herself. In a trance, for a moment she looked as if she was somehow aware. Of his watching? Of his questions? Or was it simply a marshalling of thought, concurrent with the arrival of his father?
The old man was walking towards them with one of the other men who had accompanied Lili and Vansen - a man so blank he could be anyone and no one. His father arrived at the door and smiled at Lili. There was little sincerity in it. How could there be? He wondered how she did it, how she brought herself to work for him. Then he realised her reasons were probably no different to his own, not so long ago. You go along with it, you give it the benefit of the doubt for a time. Until you realise the doubt has no benefits and anything you hoped to learn or acquire is hopelessly out of your grasp or out of your depth. Yet, Lili had never felt the need to prove something to a man who had alternately discounted him, then dangled a carrot. Suddenly he realised that they, both he and his father had been playing off against each other in the stupidest sense. They had both wanted to be vindicated - in each other.
The old man: as proof that his cause could be furthered - that it had merit and he, not Bill Mulder, had concluded correctly for the human race. Himself: if only to shake the sense of irresolution that had dogged him all his life. Ambition was, after all, the last refuge of failure. It was why, once, he had actually cared what his superiors thought of him. It was why he had hated the paranormal or being remotely different. Because, when it came down to it he didn't feel normal - never had - and he'd mocked himself long ago, hoping he could bury it and forget about it. Yet every single skeleton had come home to roost. Including his own.
He had tried to outrun his own manipulation. He had tried to protect to his mother. But failed. He had assumed he understood the stage he was playing on, only to find the ramifications were above and beyond anything he could imagine. And then he made the mistake of the final assumption - that his father was capable of feeling anything other than the cold grasp for power and command. He, Jeffrey, had sold it on that one. His actions demanded a sacrifice - and his father was no Abraham. If only he'd had a clue that in colluding - even misguidedly - with his progenitor, he'd been dancing with the devil. Honour me, honour my memory. There was a fine line between fools and great men and he wasn't one to straddle it.
His father entered the room where he lay, and asked Lili - only Lili - to accompany him. There was no slowness in his progress to the bedside, however, some immutable heaviness strained his movements. To give him some credit, the old man, habitually reaching for his pack of Morleys, had thought the better of drawing out the cigarette. The redheaded pack again retreated to the depths of the hidden black pocket. He took in the bandaged, swollen head of his son. The various wires and needles. The rise and fall of the respirator, and said, finally, in the quietest voice she'd ever heard him use:
"Make sure...he's cremated."
She, not betraying herself for a second, nodded. She moved to his bed, her fingers moving over the switches and dials, turning them of and down - one by one. She watched the ECG flat line, before turning it off. His father couldn't see how she looked - so very much in a dark place - a subtle tick of calculation unfolding in her, something inexplicable. She was turned away from him.
And no sooner had every monitor, machine, wire and memory died in the room, then his father took his leave.
* * *
AGE OF INNOCENCE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
'"You see that elegant young man going into that fine, peaceful house: his name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, or something. A woman dedicated herself to loving this spiteful fool: she is dead, she is certainly a saint in heaven, now. You will kill me as he killed that woman. That is the fate of us charitable hearts...'"
A Season In Hell - Arthur Rimbaud
...Across the pain-jerked body of the Night
We must go, taking the new-born Death in arms,
Holding it close, warmly to us, as our own,
Giving it new games to play, new toys to tear apart.
Tunisian Patrol - Richard Spender
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Crestfallen]
He had come over the last dune and felt the vibrations of her presence across the wide emptiness. For once there was a sense of disruption to what had merely been an eternity of sand, fire and air. He judged that they were going somewhere this time - no longer the sightseeing of obscure days, years? (He hadn't counted the wild leaps of the blazing satellite, that he called a sun but probably wasn't). He had once, as he had suspected that it was all a by-product of a mind swollen and numbed in trauma. That had passed, now he simply accepted that he didn't really know anything anymore.
That was why, when he stood there, on the sands of his time, on the shore of his memory - and knew she was coming for him, and knew what an insane quest that was - his heart broke a thousandfold, right there within his chest. Jeffrey Spender was dead. Long live Jeffrey Franklin Spender.
The dusty air tore at his skin and his soul relinquished a tear to the ionized fingers of the coming storm. The wind flapped around him, and, despite its great height above them both, the awesome satellite passed into impossible darkness. Night descended and over the sharp endless rise of sand, a moon danced sublime; the earth cooling to a premature midnight as his companion and he passed into a cave on the frontier. A cave in the middle of nowhere, like an oasis in the middle of hell.
The Companion had been with him from the beginning. He had called her then the Whore of Death. Men had seen her in war on the battlefield and to embrace her was to fall, her kiss was death. She had entered like a dementia, the solid halls of his reality, the squalid horror of the basement, *the* solitary figure in the room after his departed father: the man who had unquestioningly put his own weapon to his head and fired, speaking words of 'honour'.
With her crazed, violet eyes and her dark lips, she had squatted over his bloody prostrate form and brought her tongue over his lips but once. Before his body, locking in seizure, had thrown him here. In limbo, where he was permitted to journey across the blazing sand to all places, and all things. To the beginning and the end.
His eyes had gone blind for a moment against the preternatural daylight and she had put out a hand to steady him from falling into the steep, white drop below - a backdrop of endless desert nothing. He had mistaken the black material whirling around her for crow-coloured wings at first. The strands of her hair sucked in light, as they tore at the sky in a mad arc behind her - yet he couldn't see her face. He was borne into a fiery pit with confusion, disaster - helpless and half-blind. She had taken his defeated body up in her arms and swathed him, swathed him in strange cloth - he heard it flapping errantly in the updraught. He was lifted again and carried.
How bizarre it had all seemed. That they had passed the stray columns of a long abandoned city and disappeared below into someone's crypt. Below the whipping of the sand above. He hadn't seen the sun set, but he knew that it had.
In the darkness, a candle lamp was lit to consume the shadow and throw light across his companion's face. She, who took down the hooded shroud and revealed herself. He beheld the face of his amethyst-eyed, former partner, Diana Fowley. A bitter laugh had risen in his chest but got stuck, only growling ominously like a cough. He was truly in the land of the mad. What dreams are these, Jeffrey? The ravings of a mad man.
But the voice that came from Diana soon sobered him. It sang the song eternal, the primal rumblings of the heavens. It was the permanent ending of all, that the seraphs would, in flights against the stars, use to split the planets.
"You have been permitted," the voice imploded, "to see all things."
He was not afraid to speak:
"Why?"
It was his own voice that scared him, its timbre, new and rich and strong. It was the strength he feared, the unbearable will to carry on. But this was not to be a conversation, and unlike the man he had been before, while he could laugh at the absurdity of what he now saw, he did not fear it. His acceptance passed into grace. He rose, a spirit on gossamer wings, soaring the flames of understanding, singeing his wings, falling, triumphing nonetheless. He knew he had to fall to rise again from the depths.
Diana, with her eyes as mad as moonlight, touched him with a glacial hand. The lids of his eyes on fire.
"Look." she said.
And he saw.
* * *
They came and moved him in the night. Stole him away like common thieves. He had been in a hospital - the kind that free men use and bring their children with the lacerated limbs, the women with the first tremors of labour, their best friends with the accidents that shouldn't have happened. *He* was not meant to be there - and no record of him ever having been would be recovered.
What stubborn vagaries of chance and irony determined he dare to live, without a prayer of regaining conscious independent thought? That he was lucky, or that he was a Spender? Who took bullets in their sleep and got up and walked like the dead men they were. His father had been here too - a 'murdered' man, bleeding into the carpet. The photograph, a crime scene curio. A picture of Samantha and Fox Mulder. Not of Jeffrey and Cassandra Spender. He smiled that the old man had at least a heart to be blown out of him. A man who had never been honoured had not the sentiment to betray. Yet, like his father before him, he refused to die.
But 'they' would see about that. His body hurtling through space, under the screaming siren of an ambulance - an ambulance that, like him, was going to disappear. The only surprise was that she was there with him: his Lili, his lily of the morning. The one, who in haste and heat and uncertainty, he had loved. He alone had seen the mad, desperate fear that had risen, like blood, to her face and vanished just as quickly. She moved as silently and stealthily as did her partner - on orders. Except, that beneath the cloak of conspirital authority she had harboured for some time a dagger of hard, silent perfidy. The hour of her insurrection was nigh, and from there, there was little to come back to. He knew. Behold! his broken body.
No state line had yet been crossed before his body was transferred into an unmarked van. The ambulance abandoned. The secrecy secured. Lili never left him, she and another called, Vansen, were to deliver him - for the last time - unto the tender audience of his father. And all the time she drove, her black uniform making her unequivocally pale in the dark recesses of the seat, her spine was fused with fear - for him - that she had come all this way just to watch him die. This time, not only he had noticed the harsh resolution of her gaze when, she, Vansen and the two others had settled him into the back. She had expected only a driver, not two. Maybe Old Smoky didn't trust her as entirely as she'd hoped. And while she might explain killing one, two would so surely sign her betrayal that she might as well load those two bullets into the back of her own skull.
But that didn't stop her thinking about it. All the way there. Vansen looked at her again once. He had an inkling that she was going to turn but that was all.
He was taken, of all places, to a sanatorium for the criminally insane. It was really a front for what had been the site of various experiments on random Americans unfortunate enough to be there. Experiments on the effect of attenuated strains of the alien 'black oil' virus. Given enough time, everyone grew murderous or really did go mad. Or both. He was put in a room, still machine supported. Until the great man himself would deign to see him. Lili was posted outside.
He watched her in the hall. She was silent, her back to the door. He sensed the speechless desperation though no one else would have. Why was he so important to her? They had only spent one night together, hadn't they? And they had decided that it go no further than that. Then why was she here? He was out of the loop. What was he missing? Her lips moved in a slight tremor, like she was talking to herself. In a trance, for a moment she looked as if she was somehow aware. Of his watching? Of his questions? Or was it simply a marshalling of thought, concurrent with the arrival of his father?
The old man was walking towards them with one of the other men who had accompanied Lili and Vansen - a man so blank he could be anyone and no one. His father arrived at the door and smiled at Lili. There was little sincerity in it. How could there be? He wondered how she did it, how she brought herself to work for him. Then he realised her reasons were probably no different to his own, not so long ago. You go along with it, you give it the benefit of the doubt for a time. Until you realise the doubt has no benefits and anything you hoped to learn or acquire is hopelessly out of your grasp or out of your depth. Yet, Lili had never felt the need to prove something to a man who had alternately discounted him, then dangled a carrot. Suddenly he realised that they, both he and his father had been playing off against each other in the stupidest sense. They had both wanted to be vindicated - in each other.
The old man: as proof that his cause could be furthered - that it had merit and he, not Bill Mulder, had concluded correctly for the human race. Himself: if only to shake the sense of irresolution that had dogged him all his life. Ambition was, after all, the last refuge of failure. It was why, once, he had actually cared what his superiors thought of him. It was why he had hated the paranormal or being remotely different. Because, when it came down to it he didn't feel normal - never had - and he'd mocked himself long ago, hoping he could bury it and forget about it. Yet every single skeleton had come home to roost. Including his own.
He had tried to outrun his own manipulation. He had tried to protect to his mother. But failed. He had assumed he understood the stage he was playing on, only to find the ramifications were above and beyond anything he could imagine. And then he made the mistake of the final assumption - that his father was capable of feeling anything other than the cold grasp for power and command. He, Jeffrey, had sold it on that one. His actions demanded a sacrifice - and his father was no Abraham. If only he'd had a clue that in colluding - even misguidedly - with his progenitor, he'd been dancing with the devil. Honour me, honour my memory. There was a fine line between fools and great men and he wasn't one to straddle it.
His father entered the room where he lay, and asked Lili - only Lili - to accompany him. There was no slowness in his progress to the bedside, however, some immutable heaviness strained his movements. To give him some credit, the old man, habitually reaching for his pack of Morleys, had thought the better of drawing out the cigarette. The redheaded pack again retreated to the depths of the hidden black pocket. He took in the bandaged, swollen head of his son. The various wires and needles. The rise and fall of the respirator, and said, finally, in the quietest voice she'd ever heard him use:
"Make sure...he's cremated."
She, not betraying herself for a second, nodded. She moved to his bed, her fingers moving over the switches and dials, turning them of and down - one by one. She watched the ECG flat line, before turning it off. His father couldn't see how she looked - so very much in a dark place - a subtle tick of calculation unfolding in her, something inexplicable. She was turned away from him.
And no sooner had every monitor, machine, wire and memory died in the room, then his father took his leave.
* * *