Green Eyes

  ‘Not as such! Still, a case might be made for it. And wouldn’t it be a surprise package if we learned there were exact correlations between personality types and the voodoo pantheon!’ Edman pursed his lips and tapped them with his forefinger. ‘You must be familiar with anthropological studies in this area… Any input?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jocundra, unhappy at having to supply grist for Edman’s mill, ‘the voodoo concept of the soul has some resonance with your thesis. According to doctrine all human beings have two souls. The ti bon ange, which is more or less the conscience, the socialized part of the mind, and the gros bon ange, which is the undying part, the immortal twin. It’s been described as the image of a man reflected by a dark mirror. You might want to read Deren or Metraux.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Edman bent to his notepad. ‘Tell me, Ms Verret. Do you like Donnell?’ He cocked an eye toward her, continuing to write. ‘You must have some personal reaction.’

  Jocundra was startled by the question. ‘I think he’s brilliant,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen his work.’

  ‘It seems quite competent, but that’s not what I’m driving at. Suppose Donnell wasn’t your patient, would you be attracted to him?’

  ‘I don’t believe that’s relevant,’ she said defensively. ‘Not to the project or…’

  ‘You’re right, of course. Sorry.’ Edman took another note and favored her with a paternal smile. ‘I’m just an old snoop.’

  ‘I’m concerned for him, I’m not happy he’s going to die.’

  ‘Please! Your private concerns are just that. Sorry.’

  Edman opened a file drawer and rummaged through it, leaving Jocundra a little flustered. The sun was going down, staining the faceted panes to ruby, empurpling the shadows along the wall, and these decaying colors -augmented by the glutinous sound of Edman’s breath as he bent over the file, taxed by even this slight exertion - congealed into a perverse atmosphere. She felt soiled. His question had not been idle curiosity; he was constantly prying, hinting, insinuating. Her opinion of him had always been low, but never so low as now. She pictured him alone in the office, entertaining fantasies about the therapists, fondling himself while watching videos of the patients, feeding upon the potential for sickness which the project incorporated.

  At last he unbent, his pale face mooning above the desk. ‘The microbiology people think Magnusson’s the key…’ He paused, his attention commanded by a clipping in a manila folder; he clucked to himself and closed it. ‘Did you know they’ve been letting him work on material related to the bacterial process?’

  ‘Yes, Laura told me.’

  ‘Ah! Well, he is important. But because of Donnell’s youth, his human focus, it’s possible he’s going to give us a clearer look into the basis of consciousness than even Magnusson. Now that he’s in harness it’s time to lay off the whip and break out the sugar, although’ - Edman fussed with papers - ‘although I wonder if it isn’t time for another forced interaction.’

  ‘He’s working so smoothly now, I’d hate to disrupt him… and besides, he didn’t react well to Richmond.’

  ‘None of them react well to Richmond!’ Edman laughed. ‘But I keep thinking if we could override this fear reaction of theirs, we might proceed by leaps and bounds. Even Richmond seems reluctant for intimate confrontation. He enjoys facing down his own fear, but his contacts are kept on the level of ritual aggression.’

Edman rambled off onto other matters, talking mainly to himself as he dealt with his files; he admitted to using his sessions with the therapists as a means to order his thoughts, and Jocundra knew her active participation was not required. She wondered how he would wed his latest theory to his previous one: that of cellular wish-fulfilment. He considered Richmond weighty evidence in support of the latter because, unlike the rest of the slow-burners -all of whom had murky backgrounds - the body had a thoroughly documented past. Richmond, born Eliot Vuillemont, had been the heir of a prominent New Orleans family, disinherited for reasons of drug abuse. This young man, Edman argued, who had lived a life of ineffectual rebellion, whose college psychiatric records reflected a history of cowardice and repressed violence, had chosen as his posthumous role the antihero, the apocalyptic lone wolf; the new personality was a triumphant expression of the feebly manifested drives which had led to his death by overdose. Edman posited that the workings of memory chemically changed portions of the RNA - those portions containing the bioform of our most secret and complex wish, ‘the deepest reason we have made for being’ - and intensified their capacity for survival. It was, Jocundra thought, a more viable theory than his latest, but she had no doubt both would soon appear in published form, welded together into a rickety construct studded with bits of glitter: a Rube Goldberg theory of the personality.