Green Eyes

  ‘God! The entorhinal system!’ Brauer blurted it out like a hallelujah, and the other doctors joined in an awed litany: ‘I told Kinski I suspected…’ ‘Brain reward and memory consolidation…’ ‘Incredible!’ The babble of pilgrims who, through miraculous witness, had been brought hard upon their central mystery.

  ‘Doctors!’ Ezawa waved his scalpel. ‘Let’s get an anatomical picture down on tape before we speculate.’ He addressed himself to the recorder. ‘Extremely high concentrations of bacteria in the medial and sulcral regions of the frontal cortex, the substantia regia, the entorhinal complex of the temporal lobe. It appears that the dopamine and norepenephrine systems are the main loci of the bacterial activity.’ He began to slice little sections here and there, dropping them into baggies, and Magnusson’s chest soon became a waste table. He held up a baggie containing a glowing bit of greenery to the ceiling lights. ‘Remarkable changes in the ventral tegumentum. Be interesting to run this through the centrifuge.’

  Donnell switched off the speaker. A wave of self-loathing swept over him; he felt less than animal, a puppet manipulated by luminous green claws which squeezed his ventral tegumentum into alien conformations. The feathery ticklings inside his head were, he hoped, his imagination. Magnusson was right: logic dictated escape. He could not see what was best for himself unless he left behind this charnel house where crafty witch doctors chased him through mazes and charted his consciousness and waited to mince him up and whirl his bits in a centrifuge. But he was going to need Jocundra’s help to escape, and he was not sure he could trust her. He believed that her lies had been in the interests of compassion, but it would be necessary to test the depth of her compassion, the quality of the feelings that ruled it. Having thought of her for weeks in heavy emotional contexts, it amazed him he could think so calculatingly of her now, that - without any change in his basic attitude, without the least diminution of desire - he could so easily shift from needing her to using her.

 With Brauer assisting, Ezawa opened Magnusson’s chest and they examined the organs. Bastards! Donnell switched off the mirror. He flipped through the ledger, skimming paragraphs. It was a peculiar record, a compendium of scientific data, erratic humour, guesswork, metaphysical speculations, and he drew from it a picture of Magnusson not as the cackling old madman he had appeared, but as he had perceived himself: a powerful soul imprisoned in a web of wrinkled flesh and brittle struts of bone. One of the last entries spoke directly to this self-perception:

  … Over the past months I have had contact with thirteen fellow patients, half of them now deceased, and in each case, as in my own, I have noticed we exhibit - manifest both in our work and our behavior - an obsession with nobility, with regal imagery; it seems to comprise part of our innate self-image. I suspect a psychiatrist might countenance this as a result of the death trauma, suggesting we had linked the myth of Christ arisen to our deep insecurity at having died and been reborn so changed and incomplete. But I sense in myself and the others nothing that reflects the gentle Christian fabrication; rather the imagery is of a pagan sort and the feeling of nobility is one of a great brooding spirit, half-animal, his perceptions darkening the trivial light of day. When I feel this spirit moving within me, I cannot believe otherwise than that all my illusory dry-as-dust memories of sorting test tubes and sniffing after some crumb of scientific legend have been foisted on me by the process of my life at Shadows, and that they are a veneer covering a reservoir of more potent memories.

  All of us now alive embody this spirit in individualistic fashion: Richmond, who poses as the hoodlum warrior; Monroe, with her alter ego the sorceress Luweji; French, the corporate duke; Harrison, the bleak poetic prince; Ramsburgh, the mad dowager who knits coverlets and shawls which depict Druidic scenes of haunted woods and graven altars. I believe that this common tendency is of extreme importance, though I am not certain in what way; but lately I have experienced a refinement of these feelings.