#unnecacary metaphysics

[residesatshamecentral]

Masks and mirrors

I don’t do fanfiction, yet here I am. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

.....

1. Grey skies

Everything was grey.

The country was depressed. The eyes of the houses were empty and grey. The children in the streets, before the war, had been relatively clean, chasing each other and throwing stones after school, or buying sweets at the corner shops. Now, many of them wore clothes so patched that they would once have been used for rags ages ago, and no-one had money to spare for the sweet shop any more.

Archer felt nothing.

He observed the world as though from deep underwater. Sometimes he would wonder - watching a woman with Jewish blood being arrested or a dissenter gunned down - if he really counted as a human being any more. Human beings would respond to all this wouldn't they? Mostly though, he got on with his work.

Until Huth happened to him.

 2. Stirrings

Fear – and the occasional twinge of disgust – were the only real emotions that filtered down to the chilly underwater world Archer seemed to inhabit now. So fear was not an unfamiliar reaction, or unexpected.

The little verbal blows were new though. Something broken and raw twisted in Archer when the SS officer mentioned his wife in passing. He kept his face as blank as possible with Huth watching him, and tried to read his expression. They were passing through one of the poorer areas. Stretches of dark road, unlit except by the light from windows gave way to intermittently lit main roads. The light from the street lamps passed over the new officer's face and away again, leaving Archer none the wiser.

Huth's eyes were very pale. They were, Archer thought distantly, the colour of dirty ice, and the light in them was icy too. Horribly intelligent eyes. They seemed to see too far into you, and left you feeling disturbed and slightly sickened, as though you had just undergone an examination where no limits of privacy were respected.

When he finally got home, away from the new officer, he found space to breathe for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. He got into bed gratefully, aching with tiredness.

Detectives are plagued with the disease of all intelligent introverts, introspection, and worse, they are trained to look deeper than most people. In the foggy void that hangs between sleep and waking, Archer found himself trying to analyse the disturbed emotional state Huth had left him in. he was not the same, he knew. With this frightening man around - probably for the long term – he was in for something long-drawn-out and already he was feeling the marks. Not a good sign.

Was it, he thought sleepily, that the man was too honest? Or too malicious? Or too lacking in pity? Or all three? Was he just too demanding a personality to be around comfortably? Five minutes in his presence was like standing next to a furnace. Sooner or later the heat would get to you.

  3. Ragings

He punched the officer in the face.

He punched him in the face. Terror, hatred, pride, all the emotions he had though buried and calcified went into that punch, there, in the cellar of his blasted home, where the body of his informant hung like a parody or a scarecrow.

Then he waited for death.

A strange calm filled him as his tormentor stood straight. He was a man, here, now. They could do what they like to him but he would die a man. He met Huth's eyes steadily.

For the fist time in four years, he felt whole.

And Huth...laughed.

  4. Dreamings

Archer rarely dreamed, but when he did, he tended to forget them. The night after the assassin attacked him, he woke sweating, heart hammering, tasting salt. Barbara was in the kitchen, her space on the bed cold beside him.

He had dreamed he was dead. Deep, deep underwater, on the slimy seabed, so deep that the light no longer penetrated, among black, stony caverns where the only sea life is the stuff of nightmares. And he was very dead.

Help he tried to scream, but corpses cannot talk and who could have heard him anyway? He was alone, trapped in a body that would not move because no blood beat through it, feeling the slimy seaweed twine around him, the only sound the distant heartbeat of an ocean.

He had no idea how long he floated there, in silent panic. But at last a calm came over him. So he was alone. No news there. We all have to fight the world alone. He must simply make himself move.

With effort, with great patience and effort, he forced his dead body to obey him. First his fingers, them his hands clenched. His sluggish arms moved, then pushed his dead torso up from the seabed. Alone, dead, or un-dead, or half-dead, he stood alone, in the dark, and then began to swim upwards, seeking the light.

There no time in that place, or all times were eternity, but the darkness began to thin. The light-less void became a green void. Diaphanous shapes in the distance that might have been jellyfish surrounded him, passing by. He was back among the living. Above him the sun glimmered and he strove toward it, half-sure now that he could feel his fingers again.

A huge shape of pure darkness blocked the light above him. I knew you had it in you, Archer whispered  Huth.

And he was falling, far beyond the dark he had known as death, beyond the caves at the bottom of the sea, falling in terror because this was final, there was no way up, and the eyes of the world were on him as he fell.

Awake in the small hours, Archer ran himself a bath. Cold sweat still clung to him. He knew he was not ready to brave sleep again, yet. He sat on the edge of the bath and considered recounting the dream to Barbara. The horror he had felt was too real to him. It had not vanished with the dream  but stayed, lurking, like the clammy sense we feel on having touched something dead. Perhaps, he thought, recounting the dream would help him make sense of it. He closed his eyes, soothed by the sound of running water, and saw the dark shape above him, indecipherable, blocking the light. Heard the whisper in his inner ear. What a horrible sense of intimacy it had carried.

He turned off the tap and got into the bath, sinking in past his ears. He would not tell Barbara, he decided. If she failed to understand the dream, she would be no help, and if she did understand, well, he had had more than enough of other people reading his soul lately.

  5. Offerings

Huth was drunk, and Archer would have barely believed it. The Huth he knew, the leather-trenchcoat-clad, steely-eyed, iron-souled force of nature was incapable of being drunk, just as he was incapable of being vulnerable or bitter. The man slumped into his chair was all three.

Archer was an analyst of human beings, though not, he admitted to himself, the best analyst. He was better at understanding evidence than people. He never kidded himself that he was even close to having the measure of Huth, but he had built up an image of the man. He sipped his drink – he had orders to take one after all – and tried to reassess his enigmatic superior.

What forces shape us into people like this, he wondered? Huth seemed almost to be talking into the void, talking like man dictating a diary, or the memoirs of his private sins. Archer thought of the caverns at the bottom of the sea, and the cold touch of the seaweed, and the silence. He repressed a shudder. Life was worse for Huth than that, he thought. There was no immobility about Huth's life, but worse, there were no escape routes. You could see despair in his posture, languid and long-term.

Huth was the most driven man he had ever met, but there was nowhere for him to run to, nothing to strive for, because he believed in nothing. Apart from himself, there was no firm ground. His prison had no escape route, so he was alone without hope.

Now Archer saw a mourning, rather broken human being, and he was not sure he wanted to.

Now where did that thought come from, he wondered? Odd that he should dislike seeing Huth like this. It was not the embarrassment of seeing private grief. Not exactly.

“Would you like to stay with me, Archer?”

The chilly eyes had something new in them. “On my personal staff?” The touch to his cheek, roughly affectionate, could have been mistaken for patronising fondness. The hand dragged down his chest could not. Huth leaned back in his chair. The statement was made. An odd, joyless grin settled over his face. There was a direction-less hate in his eyes, mixed with something else. Not hope. Perhaps anticipation of hope. 

Some analyst of human beings he had proved to be, thought Archer. Why not just admit to himself that he had never properly understood Huth at all, or even tried to? He had been too wrapped up in himself to see the person. Until grief had made him crumple like this Huth had been a force of nature to him, wearing away the grey bubble of Archer's depression. Moron. You do not look at someone and see no further than the Nazi uniform.

This was Huth holding his hand out through the bars of a prison.

He wanted company. It was as simple as that. Painful, to think that the man who had dragged him out of solitude was more alone than he had ever been. And painful, to think that taking his hand was not an option. Because that was the way to Hell. It really was. Archer had met people like Huth before. Any pact with a man like this might as well be signed in blood. He would always be a sadist out for himself. You cold tell from the ice in his smile.

And yet.

And yet.

Years later, Archer would think back to that time, and think of Huth in the office that night. He would always picture him lost in himself, talking at Archer from the depths of his solitude, or reaching out, gripping Archers arm, drunkenly looking for contact. And he would wonder.

There are people who say, everything that can happen, does happen. Every relationship ends well somewhere. Every relationship ends in blood, somewhere. Somewhere close, a universe away, they broke the walls of solitude, or failed to, and Huth shot him one night on the steps of a police station with his pockets full of stolen information, and somewhere they are in bitter shared retirement with the closeness of long-term inmates, and somewhere Huth has achieved his ambitions and Archer is at his side, straight-backed in his immaculate uniform and his only regret is the look in his sons eyes every day, which scar him more deeply every time and make him wonder how much is left of his soul.

Everything happens somewhere. Archer thinks of that, and wonders where Huth was buried.