HIGH SUSPICION
Things needed a change, a turning of a corner, a breaching of a cusp, a logging of a watershed. So, I prayed for no more topless mansions, no more vertical eyes, no more attic-brained complexes, above all, no more long words catalysing the evolution of sentences. Yet, something went quite awry in the first sentence, I guess, my prayers left unanswered, so I took myself off to see the sentence shrink in the hope he would ease my contorted expressions into more simple ones and to do this with the least pain possible. I’ve booked an appointment for late in the day in the hope that I will be able to finish this piece before being sluiced clear of the prose style that has fitted me for decades like a comfortable hairshirt. However, the appointment has now come and gone. I have a high suspicion that whatever treatment he has given me will be a slow process, allowing me to finish my final pretentious text before the medicine he injected into me fully kicks in. And so I duly feel a painful simplicity overtaking me. And I am done.
Sussing Out
I had heard that Toby had developed in himself a high suspicion of approaching blindness, with all that such a condition involved. How he knew this was about to happen was a mystery to all his friends and, although I’m not a particular friend of Toby, I was called to his place to suss out the situation in advance of a doctor being consulted. It was thought better first for a quack’s verdict such as mine with a steely instinct, as that may well disperse suspicion of any superstition involved in Toby’s self-diagnosis.
I always try to keep things simple but I am required to do justice to this complex situation. So in the early days of my rapprochement with Toby, I feared I may well wander into territory that was so subtle, much more than simple simplicity would be needed. However, as far as I can now tell, simplicity had won out straightaway. So, I just told Tony not to be silly. He shrugged, and that was the last we heard of the matter.
To be blind, or not to be blind, was no more difficult a dilemma than whether simply to believe in the condition of blindness or not.
If you know anyone claiming to be blind, ask them to prove it beyond any shadow of doubt. Their word of mouth is simply not enough.
A Simple Formula
Let me explain the background on how we sell to the existential market, and the ludicrous wordplay required.
The highest suspicion we can all harbour is that of eventual death, but none can prove it, or none have managed to do so yet, in whatever hindsight that is allowed. However, as professional quack, I never ducked the issue when facing those dying. I have been both a spiritual and medical charlatan, but I had an instinct stemming from such loose thinking to outweigh my own fallibilities.
I just told them to maintain a lateral certainty against any contrary evidence that had been provided to test and thus strengthen their faith in both body and soul. And this formula worked better than any proof. A better method even than Pascal’s Wager (i.e. the safeguard in believing in God just in case He exists), although such a wager will always be useful as a supplement to the formula.
A body’s own fallibility to grow old along with its brain is best believed to the last moment of consciousness, but one never knows when that moment comes however much the mind becomes garbled or prone to a brink-of-death’s misguiding. This process of paradox can be maintained longer than a mere faith in God, a faith all too easily shaken to the very core.
The perceived ultimate truth also derives from further supplements of absurdism and self-fiction, especially when the mind wanders into previous blocked-off areas that ever-impending death makes available for anybody to enter, a truth that becomes half of a whole, and that whole a half of another whole, and so on, ad infinitum. You can then proceed to quote a cost for converting these broad ingredients into a tailor-made spreadsheet. Would you like to buy from me a franchise in this formula, so you can also become a death-defeating charlatan and quack like me, with your very own gullible clients, an invaluable pricelessness crucial to a never-ending life for you as well as for the client? A gullibility thus transcended. Any crass wordplay needed is contained in a separate folder, within the inclusive price quoted. But don’t forget — keep it simple. Get immortality done.
Of Miniatures and Mammoths
Once upon a time, there was a massive castle duly with its own battlements that had suffered many battle scars over the years. I had worked for High Suspicion since the 1960s, so I also had become experienced with such exploratory sites and how to record the history embodied in its markings. Hidden in Plain Sight was another organisation for which I had worked, more part-time than even half, but this was genuinely an extraordinary case for the first occasion in my experience, because the castle had started off life in a famous ‘fairy tale’ and I would’ve thought many of its readers like me must have already made a visit. Today, in the very place that had inspired the tale’s author to write about it, the territory was indeed overgrown, and I felt myself to be foolhardy even to try excavating its actual whereabouts. The clues as to its position in reality were peppered throughout the tale in question, but it took a special tuning-fork brain like mine to absorb and collate them correctly. Now, here I was, at last, flustered but glad I had conquered my foolhardiness. Disguised in the text, I knew, were the author’s crucial passwords to various personal websites, so he must’ve known what dangers he ran – and an organisation like High Suspicion was eager to cull such information. Having also done some free-lance work for Blind Eye, I turned such an eye vertically to the inferred purposes of High Suspicion, as I was well-paid and the missions and projects it gave me were beyond the boundaries of a computer screen. It got me out of myself, as it were. In this one example of a castle, I set about taking rubbings from the various scars on its ancient walls (a massive task) and then prepared to return with these rubbings to headquarters, but I usually sent advance photos of these traced rubbings by means of my smartphone. However, the signal was dead and its power bar already half shrunk. The scars were like cave art or gravestone etchings, with animals like mammoths and matchstick humans with bows and strings. I had to listen, meantime, because many of the structure’s secrets seemed to be musical, a sort of cross between Sir George Dyson’s Violin Concerto and Sir William Walton’s Cello Concerto, a fact I could check alongside the music downloads of these two concertos on my phone. My AirPods may have mangled the now two or four separate pieces, if you see what I mean. I watched the bar shrink further, as the structure’s mediaeval brickwork melted in the sunbeams allowed in piecemeal fashion through the thick trees — melted into bowstrung music before my very ears and eyes, and my emotions weltered as I watched figures upon the battlements, like notes upon a stave, then sinking into the very music that had been created from them. The point came when I knew I had to return before I, too, was morphed into music, but the Bluetooth Buds were stuck in a sort of musical glue; they had no noise-cancelling facilities. The war of attrition had started, with communications cut off as a punishment, no doubt, for not being more suspicious and less foolhardy. There being no other point to the tale made for the saddest possible ending to its narrative. I was only thankful for the bar, however far it shrunk, and that the AirPods should become genuine silence-inducing earplugs, purely because of the substance that glued them into the ears, my heartbeat’s nocturnes more like Xenakis or Stockhausen than the gentler side of Walton’s Agincourt. But I was later asked by the secret Stufflebeam splinter within the High Suspicion command why I usually sent photos of rubbings electronically miniaturised rather than sending photos, equally miniaturised, of what was actually scarred upon such castle walls whence my secondary rubbings derived. Well, I can only think I must be a mere middle man, not a principal or supernumerary. Perhaps at best a massive miniature with ear tusks. How many levels down I was placed in the organisation was merely a half of a half of a half… as if forever.
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