High Suspicion (3)

Toby’s Monocle

Toby wore a monocle, which in hindsight, I suppose, was a very strange thing, his having  been blind in both eyes since he was born.

But everyone like us sworn into the hidden-in-plain-sight organisation of High Suspicion (née Blind Eye) took it for granted without question. It seemed part of his personality, his very essence. We had begun slowly to realise he was not the classic scapegoat figure that all organisations needed, but soon to be revealed in our own plain sight as the manipulator and king-maker of all our levers of control and had been such from the time even before the Music pandemic and the Ruin of Ruins syndrome.

“Why do you keep in the dark, Toby?” 

I asked him this, in an unexpected light moment while sharing  generous helpings of Angel Wine as it was labelled by the bottlers, and this was a time when we were both between missions, if not mansions. But the latter were passé at that moment, and castles had long since come into prominence, but I retained an affection for the old ghost-hunting days in all manner of mansions, roofless or not. I meant nothing by the question, other than the fact he cast shadows over his own persona by a series of artfully positioned umbrellas or, as I later learned to call them, aiaigasas, when he invited some of us to share each umbrella one by one with him. Aiaigasa is a genuine Japanese word of yore, but I could not help noticing the ‘word’ ai twice as well as ‘gasa’ at the precise time in world affairs that I write this about Toby. Then I remembered that the Ruin of Ruins paradox related to words as well as structures, and that this very timely screed of mine would become less timely over time, if not completely altered by future members of High Suspicion masquerading as those destined to fulfil destinies that were never destined to happen. I stared at Toby’s monocle as it glinted like a wink in a chink of sunlight allowed through by an untimely misappropriation of one particular aiaigasa (the one I had been invited to share with him). Then his answer came:

“So that more people will read your miniatures before they alter and eventually vanish along with the rest of the planet.” 

His voice, giving this answer,  was altered by a sporadic coughing but the meaning I somehow understood. He kept us in the dark, not himself, and this was by means of leaving everyone else — including yourself reading this miniature before it started altering, via serial alternate worlds, before your very eyes — leaving everyone else, you see, in the blinding shafts of sunlight glancing unexpectedly through the cocked angel’s tail or ‘sting’ of a swirling storm that was due that day, but seemed to be ever happening already in the prevailing past. A storm like the drums in an atonal symphony.

Creative Duality in the Ruins of Monotopia

Dying Fall has ever been a musical term, while Eutopia is a Euphemism and Ditopia a Euthanasia. Meantime, a young, newly married couple — about whom we need to know little more than the fact that they were due to divorce a few years later — had stumbled, during a random hike, upon the presumed ruins of a castle in a forest about midday, although the time is uncertain. They expected, or, rather, suspected in a romantic fashion, that they might discover a significant site of interest because their love was a Bi-topia based on a faith in serendipity.

The ruin, however, was not as a ruin should be. It was fairly recognisable as  the remains of an Angevin castle like the one in Angers, if they had enough knowledge about castles (which they didn’t), but they were more intrigued with how these ruins were ‘built’ from, or into, tiers of tenuous shadows, the substance of which was only apparent the closer one reached towards it with fingers to test it. The outline was softer by gradient than might be expected but sharper, too, in some areas, and straighter in other areas, rather than curvy. The curvy areas held an inner shape that looked like a face with a monocle. But it was, in truth, a patch. The woman made it clear she thought along such lines, but the man seemed quizzical, knowing she was susceptible to pareidolia or making-much-out-of-nothing as he sometimes called it in his moments of characteristic petulance. 

‘Susceptible’ was tantamount to ‘Suspectible’, although he would never have used such words, even ‘pareidolia’ being beyond his vocabulary’s capacity to contain. Which makes me think this good-intentioned, naïve couple deserve a more understanding narrator than me to depict them. I never expected to break my initial stipulation, mentioned at outset, that there was little need to know this couple better, especially as I already knew that they were both to be subsumed by some mysterious musical force in the vicinity of the strange ruins and that they later returned to their honeymoon hotel as quite different people who together lived happily ever after…

… which does not mean it was a happy ending necessarily as they did not deserve each other and lived in a hidden-in-plain-sight suppression or mitigation of what they might have become if they had never met each other or fallen within each other’s control. To be or not to be, the state of happiness or happenstance, in other words, or in other worlds, only skin deep, and simply perceived as such. It takes a gestalt of the ghosts of all authors, living or dead or artificial, to fulfil optimum expectations of narrative truth in this and other contexts, as based on the theory that the one-eyed human is God when the rest of us are blind in both eyes. An eye for an eye for an AI. An era for an era, too, via Dysfunction or Dissonance or Dincopation in the Land of Dying Falls.

CODA:

Yesterday, I wrote the above with the care and attention of what should be expected from someone who prides himself as a conscientious narrator of fiction truth. And last night, I dreamt of its ruin of ruins remaining viable in whatever continuously morphed state while the young couple whom I had created travelled into some distant future of reluctant happiness. I saw the ruins wriggle with earworms into a large cairn, then into a sound-mass that acted like a slow but feral animal riddled by volume vermin attacking the ears of any living creature in its vicinity, with relentless tuning-forks and variously expressed earthworms as well as earworms, concatenations of noise, that, when cultured like devious pearls, I almost hunted out like a drug.

I recall a different dream that followed the first dream that was inexplicably connected with it. I was alone in the bungalow house where I had lived and called a ‘mansion’ for decades with my wife, and I wondered if indeed, we had originally been the young couple who first found the ruins in the forest. I sensed she had returned from wherever she had gone with her Ladies group. We still loved each other at our advanced stages, but we slept in separate bedrooms for the sake of peace and quiet from the atonal snores, from the collateral bodily noises and from the disruptive  bathroom visits  of each other.  I looked up the stairs to see that there was a key protruding from the lock of her bedroom door, and it was slowly turning with nobody standing there to turn it. Was she locking herself inside the room, by locking it from outside it? I think this was the most chilling dream I had ever experienced. And I had forgotten I was wearing my noise cancelling Bluetooths that I often used in bed at the depths of night to listen to the Schoenberg. And it was not a dream at all. Perhaps none of them were.

High Suspicion of an Epilogue

When I approached the crucial site it was still hidden in plain sight to most others. I turned  a blind eye to any susceptibility to danger, and equally to the high suspectibility of a Babel tower of melting words still shimmering in the mist behind it. The ruins themselves were now spreading as still fermenting Angel Wine, not the usual red or white sort, but black — thickening and thinning at some AI’s behest — a substance sown with swaying flowers like human heads each sporting  a monocle or eye-patch, take your pick as to which, and to never know what was to be or not to be.