Disclaimer: "Detective Conan" belongs to Gosho Aoyama.
Becoming Conan
by FS
Chapter 6: Indigo (1)
Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw —
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime — Macavity's not there!
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime — Macavity's not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air —
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity's not there!
...
(from "Macavity: The Mystery Cat", by T. S. Eliot; in Cats, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber)
c.
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
(from The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde)
c.
Growing up as a prodigy had its pitfalls. Loneliness among people wasn't easy to endure.
c.
"What colour are you today?"
Will they never, ever, get sick of this game? When will Mr and Mrs Kudo's twin prodigies learn the meaning of "leave me alone for an hour"?
"Black." Wassily Kandinsky said that black was "like the silence of the body after death, the close of life", and Shiho feels dead-tired today. In theory, she should have long died from the acute lack of sleep. There must have been instances of microsleep she wasn't aware of, or she is already dead and doomed to spend an eternity playing this never-ending colour game in hell.
"Black isn't a colour," Christie objects. Otousan has told her that black is the absence of light. It's a non-colour, the colour of the primordial void.
Shiho could have reminded Christie of the abundant shades of black in nature or told the girl that black was one of the first colours used in art, that Manet liked black for dramatic effect, that one of Van Gogh's final paintings (Van Gogh's final painting?) was the Wheatfield with Crows. But before her inner eye, Shiho can suddenly see black crow-like figures in crumpled raincoats silhouetted against Shibuya's flashy neon lights—a scene which reminds her that there are fights she can afford to lose because certain things aren't worth dwelling on.
"I'll be Grey then," Shiho suggests. Grey is moody and sophisticated, tranquil but strong, as timeless as sorrow itself. The name "Grey" (or "Gray") also triggers conflicting emotions: Cordelia Gray, Dorian Gray, Edward Grey…
"It's an achromatic colour," Chandler laconically remarks before refocusing his attention on Shiho's favourite blue fountain pen. "Achromatic colours don't count."
"Fine, I'll be Blue again—a dark shade of it." A tragedy is bound to happen if they don't leave her in peace!
"Reddish or greenish?" Christie asks. The girl has recently learned to paint and is now putting her hard-earned mastery of colour mixing to good use. "Warm or cool?"
"Warm, with a reddish tint!"
"A purplish blue then?"
"Not really purplish, just slightly reddish, and as dark as the night." Shiho drags her palm across her midnight-blue jersey sheets. "I'm this shade of blue."
"It's indigo!" Christie declares with a raised index finger.
"All right, indigo," Shiho relents. The word has been missing from her active vocabulary, which is rapidly dwindling away. "I'm Indigo today."
c.
Indigo, the deep blue shade in azurite, sapphire, sodalite, lapis lazuli, Isatis tinctoria, and the night sky among other things, is generally regarded as the colour of intuition, wisdom, and truth. Shiho's choice of fountain pen ink hasn't been influenced by colour symbolism, but it's difficult for her not to think of indigo's colour meaning now that she is rereading her notes on the most meaningful conversations she has had with Shinichi. She has made every effort to stay accurate by omitting any conjecture on her part and starting all observations with "it seems". Yet ambiguity is inherent in words—even if she had managed to record every word he said, she would be none the wiser.
The bare cold facts suggest two possible explanations: either he has been in love with her for a long time and is now trying to keep a distance between the two of them for fear of escalating the situation—or he is genuinely oblivious, which is the horror vision she doesn't want to consider. Comparing the notes in her latest travel notebook to the notes in her old diaries (she has brought all the seven of them to the holiday chalet for fear of losing them to a burglar while she is away), she concludes that Shinichi's behaviour towards her hasn't changed. There have always been alternating spells of closeness and distance—and the latter wouldn't have unbalanced her mind so much if her hopes hadn't suddenly been raised by Christie's tale.
Shiho has often tried to visualize the scene to make sense of what doesn't seem right to her. Shinichi supposedly said, "I'm only in love with Haibara"; or rather, these few words are the only ones Christie could remember for sure when Shiho sounded her out on the specifics—but this is a sentence which Shiho, for a reason unknown to her, can't imagine Shinichi saying.
Today the indigo ink, which is leaning slightly towards the dreary grey of a downcast night sky, only draws circular mazes on the ivory paper. Complex branching mazes with no way out. Unicursal labyrinths whose dead ends will always contain a Minotaur...
Why is she seeking the assurance that Shinichi loves her? It wouldn't change anything about the reality of their situation: about his two children, whom she adores; about his wife, whom she can't dislike even if she tried to. Pursuing their happiness would mean to face the Minotaur at the end of the labyrinth. Even if Shinichi and she escaped from it unscathed, three people they deeply cared about wouldn't.
c.
Although she is free to go wherever she wants to, she feels like a prisoner on this isle, where nothing happens, trapped in the blue bedroom, where she can't allow herself to drop the mask of nonchalance because she will break into tears the very moment she allows herself to. Above all else, she feels trapped in her own mind. Lost in a fog of despair which doesn't ever seem to disperse, aging rapidly without becoming any wiser.
The easiest way to find out the truth would be asking Shinichi what he has said. But even if she could summon the courage to do it, the very question itself is inappropriate in their situation.
c.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. […] It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing…
(from De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde)
c.
Indigo, also the colour of the theatre and the stage, of drama and radicalism, of mystery and intrigue, would have been the right colour for Oscar Wilde, who was individualistic and unconventional to a fault—a free spirit whose far-reaching influence the Victorian society had to destroy. Wilde's greatest fault might not have been his love of freedom or his unapologetic hedonism but his compulsion to express himself, saying what he believed to be the truth despite knowing that "a little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal" (from The Critic as Artist, by Oscar Wilde).
"There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over soul and body alike. The first is called Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People," wrote the man who was the inspiration for Doyle's bohemian Sherlock Holmes in The Soul of Man under Socialism in 1891. Was Wilde lucky or unlucky to belong to the few people who had the courage to feel what they weren't supposed to feel, to want what they weren't allowed to want, to rebel against a society that took great care to ensure that love, which had always been a wild animal, was tamed and securely confined in a manageable and well-managed, socially acceptable package with a label?
c.
"Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain," observes Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, the 55000-word letter he wrote to "Bosie", his former love, during his imprisonment in Reading Goal. There is nothing to add to Wilde's writing, and Shiho wonders why she even attempts to chronicle her own suffering, which is humblingly insignificant compared to what Wilde had gone through.
"What are you reading?" asks Sera-san. Shiho is glad that her new roommate (who has been forced on her by external circumstances) hasn't asked, "What are you writing?"
"De Profundis by Oscar Wilde." Preoccupied with suppressing the treacherous urge to close her travel notebook (which is lying open under her small hardcover copy of De Profundis), Shiho betrays herself by screwing on the lid of her fountain pen.
"De… what?" Sera-san looks desolated. Obviously, "Seri" can deal with dead humans better than with dead languages.
"De Profundis. From the depth."
Oscar Wilde's literary revenge on the lover who forgot about him and the Victorian society which imprisoned him wasn't a plea of divine mercy. By the time Wilde was allowed to begin De Profundis, his health had improved slightly compared to his early time in Pentonville, where he suffered from episodes of dysentery and malnutrition. Without Nelson, the prison governor of Reading Gaol, who believed that writing would be more cathartic to a writer than hard labour, De Profundis would never have been written, and Wilde's life might have ended earlier. As things were, Wilde survived Reading Gaol by focusing his creative energies on De Profundis.
De Profundis was certainly not a "love letter" despite being hailed as one of the greatest love letters ever written by critics whose definition of "love letter" entailed illusions of grandeur and petty accusations. It wasn't Wilde's greatest piece either—reading it made Shiho mourn the loss of Wilde's erstwhile humour and wit. And yet... For all its verbose atrocities and its delusions, De Profundis was a terrifying testimony of Wilde's loneliness and grief—unique in its ruthlessly frank depiction of a crippling depression and all the coping mechanisms the author had employed to survive it.
To the horror of their friends and relatives, Oscar Wilde and "Bosie" (the painfully beautiful but also painfully airheaded Lord Alfred Douglas) lived together at the Villa Giudice, Naples, after Wilde served his term in Reading Goal. How the mismatched pair got back together is unknown. Their scandalous and tumultuous relationship eventually ended a few months later, broken up by their respective families under financial threats. Douglas was forced to return home in December 1897, whereupon Wilde moved to a cheap hotel but stayed in Naples for two months before he went to Paris. There he remained until his death in November 1900.
Even though Wilde spent the last two years of his life destitute, he wasn't alone. Robbie Ross, a former lover, continued to support Wilde financially during Wilde's last years. Ross, who would later become Wilde's executor, was also said to have been with Wilde when Wilde passed away.
The epitaph on Oscar Wilde's tomb, chosen by Ross, was taken from Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
c.
"It's hard to imagine these words on Sherlock Holmes' tombstone," remarks Shinichi. The latest case (which Christie has named "The Mystery of Oba-chan's favourite Bra") was so demanding that the rational side of Shinichi's brain must be firing up at the cost of his emotional intelligence. Or maybe he is tired of humouring Ran, who has become gloomier and angrier with every passing day.
"Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes!" Ran darkly echoes. "It. Is. Always. Sherlock. Holmes! People travel to Père-Lachaise Cemetery to kiss Oscar Wilde's tombstone because of his writings. I bet none of them cares about the fact that Doyle modelled one aspect of Sherlock Holmes' character on Wilde but you!"
"Sherlock Holmes" has become The Name That Shall Not Be Mentioned in this household, and it's easy to see why. Even Chandler has begun to hide the Sherlock Holmes books whenever his mother appears; and Shiho suspects that to both Ran and Shinichi, "Sherlock Holmes" are the magic words to the robbers' cave, the bodiless key which will lead one to either happiness or misery.
"Wilde died from meningitis due to an injury he received at Reading Gaol," says Sera-san in an attempt to shut up Shinichi, who has already opened his mouth to defend his idol. "The hard labour there has killed him! On the one hand, it's impressive how Wilde fought for his right of free expression to the bitter end. On the other hand, it would have been better for him to remain silent. He was far ahead of his time."
"He would have been far ahead of any time," Shiho remarks. Recently, she has been making a great effort to contribute to the conversations at the table so that her friends didn't need to worry about her silence. But whenever she says a word, all heads will instantly turn.
"Touché!" Sera-san laughs. "Seri" is the only adult in the holiday chalet who can still laugh naturally. Everyone else seems to have forgotten how to do it. Ran is only a faint shadow of her former self while Shinichi looks thoroughly exhausted, drained by his marital problems and the double task of working abroad while caring for two children who are just as endearing but also just as obnoxious as he himself must have been when he was small.
"Wilde wasn't jailed for his writings! He was jailed for 'gross indecency'!" Ran corrects Sera-san. There is a certain coldness in her otherwise polite tone, which surprises Shiho, as Ran usually doesn't behave aggressively towards anyone but her own husband. It couldn't have escaped Ran that Shinichi is paying "Seri" more attention than anyone else, Shiho thinks. No one can fault Ran for being jealous of Sera-san in view of Shinichi's puzzling misbehaviour.
c.
I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. [...] Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
(from De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde)
c.
"Are you all right, Ai-kun?" asks the Professor. "You look ill. Your cheeks are all sunken."
"I'm just tired... Insomnia, as always. Maybe it's the air here."
"But the air is great in this part of the world? Didn't you tell me that the sea air will benefit my health, Ai-kun?"
It must be the shutters which don't close completely: it's harder to fall asleep when it's not completely dark, Shiho suggests, whereupon the Professor promptly goes off to invent new shutters for the chalet windows. Add indigo to your life if you can't sleep—Ran, who has promptly looked up remedies against insomnia, reads aloud. "You shouldn't add indigo to your life if you're depressed, though..."
They're all trying hard to make her life easier—and the harder they try, the worse she feels. Ran has begun to seek Shiho's company now that she feels neglected by her husband. But Shiho, whose capacity of suffering has been put to its utmost stretch, can barely endure a short conversation.
She can only be alone in the bathroom, so she has begun to visit the bathroom frequently, to take long showers because it's the only place where she can cry without being disturbed. Even though Shiho has learned to like Sera-san as a person, having to share a room with Sera-san causes Shiho even more distress than expected. While Shinichi and "Seri" are still inseparable (as though "Seri" were Shinichi's genderbent mirror image), Sera-san has begun to seek Shiho's company whenever Shinichi isn't available.
Feeling "suffocated by unwanted affection" might be the wrong way to put it, but since words have ceased to make sense altogether, Shiho couldn't care less about using the right words to describe what she is feeling. Unable to express herself verbally, she has begun to doodle steel walls and barred doors. Her clumsy drawings remind her that Gin and she did have a few things in common despite their many differences: To both of them, the concept of prison didn't make sense at all.
On TV, another news story of another depressed and radicalized youth running amok in the local trains bludgeoning random passengers to death shocks the twins, who are still grappling with the concept that real life might not be much safer than the fairy tales they're reading. Due to Ran's intervention, they've been spared from the murder scenes their father frequents. She doesn't want her children to turn into unfeeling sociopaths, Ran has argued, whereupon Shinichi has shot back that he hasn't become a sociopath at all despite frequenting murder scenes since he was much younger than the twins are now.
"It's not life which shapes one's character but one's own reactions to whatever happens in one's life," he has claimed. "One always chooses one's fate! That's what free will is about, after all."
"So you mean that nothing which ever happens to you really matters in the end? That all the hapless victims who 'couldn't get over it' are, in the end, just weak and lazy?"
Ran's voice could have cut through a diamond, and Chandler, ever the one to distract the hysterical adults from their abstruse problems, has chosen the moment to inform them that indigo is the colour of justice, tradition, and devotion but also the colour of intolerance, addiction, and fanaticism...
Both of them are right, Shiho remembers thinking, and both of them are wrong. Sometimes it doesn't matter who is right when the truth is hiding somewhere in between although it matters that one person sees the head and the other person sees the tail of it. Although she herself has lost the capacity to think clearly, the talk has triggered a memory of a story she once read: A boy who grew up in a poor family of German Jews once received a savage beating from his father for exchanging an ugly coin for a much shinier coin that was worth much less. This treatment, at that time, in that social circle, was generally considered a good way to turn a foolish child into a respectable human being.
The child did indeed learn his lesson well, for he swore to himself that no one would ever get the better of him again. He grew up to be one of the most dazzling figures of the Victorian Age: a much admired gentleman thief and criminal mastermind, who escaped the Pinkerton Detective Agency during his bounty jumping phase, fled from Sing Sing prison without much ado, planned the most creative and sensational heists, two of which have been alluded to in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories: "The Red-Headed League" (in which a tunnel is built to rob a bank) and "The Final Problem" (in which Holmes recognizes a famous stolen painting).
Casino tables which seamlessly folded into the walls when the police raided the club... Violence-free train and bank robberies, mysterious disappearances of priceless gems and jewellery... Check forging, larceny, safe-cracking, swindling... There was also the gorgeous Georgiana Cavendish portrait by Thomas Gainsborough, which he cut from its frame just for the heck of it (some people would call it an act of love; others, the less romantic ones, would call it burglary and vandalism).
He called himself Edward Grey and Henry J. Raymond, and the name he was born with was Adam Worth—but to the perplexed and awed police, he was "the Napoleon of Crime". Ubiquitous and invisible, yet impossible to overlook due to his sparkling, unimitable, unworldly genius, the "Napoleon of Crime" shared non-violent, effective schemes for twenty-five per cent of the win.
William Pinkerton, the detective who tailed this puzzling maverick from the New World to the Continent, later encountered Arthur Conan Doyle on a ship. And thus the affable, elegant, peace-loving master thief whom Pinkerton chased in a confusing mix of exasperation and admiration was immortalized in the figures of John Clay and James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' arch nemesis.
c.