Green Eyes

Chapter 13

… Though Ezawa’s funding was private, he had been required by regulation to notify the government of his work with recombinant DNA. Government involvement in the project was minimal, however, until the death of Jack Richmond. The morning after his death - I had not yet learned of it - Douglas Stellings, our liaison with the CIA, visited me without appointment. I was not happy to see him. We had managed to keep news of the escape from the other patients, but Staff was in shock and the general reaction was one of utter despondency, of resignation to failure. Not even Dr Brauer could bestir himself to muster a sally against me. We had all been expecting a breakthrough, but with the exit of Magnusson, Richmond and Harrison our little stage had been robbed of its leading players, and we of our central focus. And so, when Stellings appeared, I greeted him as the bereaved might greet a member of the wake, with gloomy disinterest, and when he notified me of the deaths, I could only stare at him.

Stellings, a thin, fit man given to punctuating his phrases with sniffs, was wholly contemptuous of me, of Staff, in fact of anyone with less that CIA status. ‘We’ve told the locals to back off,’ he said. Sniff. ‘The Bureau’s taking care of it… under our supervision, thank God!’ As he glanced at the display of aboriginal crania behind my head, a tic of a smile disordered his features, which were, to my mind, pathologically inexpressive. ‘Get your people up here,’ he commanded. ‘I want to see videos of Harrison.’

Until late in the evening we reviewed Harrison’s last four days of tape. After a few initial questions, Stellings withheld comment; then, around midnight, he asked that three particular segments be rerun. The first showed Harrison sitting at his desk; he leaned forward, resting his head in his left hand, propped his right elbow on the desktop and wiggled his fingers. He gave the impression of being deep in thought. Shortly thereafter the image broke up and the screen went blank. The second section was similar, except that Harrison was limping along the downstairs hall, and the third, recorded the night of the escape, was identical to the first.

‘Cameras are always screwing up,’ muttered someone.

Stellings ran the tape back to the beginning of the third segment, then ran it forward again. ‘He’s peeking at the camera,’ he said. ‘He’s looking up and sideways so you won’t notice, masking his eyes behind his fingers. And then he waggles his fingers, we count to ten’ - he counted - ‘and the camera malfunctions. Got it?’

‘Just like Magnusson,’ breathed Dr Leavitt in tones of awe, tones which sounded false to my ear.

‘What about Magnusson?’ snapped Stellings.

‘He exhibited similar finger-eye behavior prior to video malfunctions,’ said Leavitt - earnest, deeply respectful Leavitt. ‘I mentioned it to Dr Brauer, but he didn’t assign it much importance.’

‘You people ought to be in short pants,’ said Stellings with disgust.

‘Why wasn’t I appraised of this?’ I asked of Brauer. I was, I admit, delighted to see him squirm, though I realized that the downfall of a Brauer only permits the rise of a Leavitt; and Leavitt, our learning expert, whose primary contribution had thus far been a study of the patients’ acquisition of autobiographical detail from their exposure to television, was if anything more of an opportunist than Brauer.Of course I had not noticed Harrison’s behavior myself, but there sat Brauer, narrow-eyed, licking his lips, the image of a crook set up to take the rap.

Stellings dismissed everyone excepting myself and called his superiors. He recommended that all measures be taken to remove the FBI from the case, thus beginning the jurisdictional dispute which, in effect, allowed Harrison and Verret to find refuge at the home of Clarence Brisbeau. At the moment Harrison stood upon the stage of the revival in Salt Harvest, not one agent or officer was searching for him. All the hounds had been frozen at point, waiting until their masters could untangle their leashes, and by the time the CIA had won dominance and Harrison had been located, the decision had been made to permit his continued freedom. The idea was, as Stellings put it, to ‘let him roll and see if he comes up sevens.’ Harrison would certainly prove uncooperative if captured; therefore it would be more profitable to monitor him. Brisbeau’s cabin was not an optimal security situation, but its isolation was a positive factor, and neither Stellings nor his superiors expected Harrison to run. Besides, there would be other slow-burners; the more Harrison inadvertently revealed, the more effectively we would be able to control them. When it was learned that Harrison was practising a form of faith healing, the CIA, in a master stroke of bureaucratic efficiency, sent him patients from their hospital, all of whom experienced miracle cures; and it was then -awakened by this luridly mystical image of sick spies being made whole by the ministrations of a ‘zombie’ healer - that I came out of the fog which had lowered about me since the escape and began to be afraid.

The surveillance devices planted within Brisbeau’s cabin malfunctioned most of the time, but on days when no patients visited and Harrison’s electrical activity was at a minimum, we were sometimes able to pick up distorted transmissions; and from them, as well as from our extant knowledge and agents’ reports, we pieced together the science underlying Harrison’s abilities. Stellings evinced little surprise upon learning of the cures or any other of the marvels; his reactions consisted merely of further schemes and recommendations. Yet I was shaken. Harrison had been alive five months, and he was already capable of miracles. And listening to one particular exchange between him and Verret, we caught a hint of some new evolution of ability.

VERRET: What is it?

HARRISON: Nothing. Just the gros bon ange. I’m getting better at controlling it (laughter) or vice versa.

VERRET: What do I look like?

HARRISON: You’ve got a beautiful soul. (Verret laughs). What I was reacting to was that all the bits of fire were swarming about in the black, coalescing at random, and then, whoosh! they all converged to form into your mask. It wasn’t the same as usual, though the features were the same. Are the same. But the colors are different. Less blue, more gold and ruby.

VERRET: I wonder…

HARRISON: What?

VERRET: A second ago I was thinking about you… very romantically.

HARRISON: Yeah? (A rustling sound.)

VERRET: (laughing) Do I feel different? (A silence.) What’s wrong?

HARRISON: Just trying to shift back. It’s hard to do sometimes.

VERRET: Why don’t you not bother? I don’t mind.

HARRISON: (His voice becomes briefly very resonant, as if the transmission were stabilizing.) It’d be like two charred corpses making love. (A long silence.) There. Are you okay?

VERRET: (shakily) Yes.

HARRISON: Oh, Christ! I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry.

VERRET: You’ve no reason to be.

Thereafter Harrison’s electrical activity increased, and the transmission distorted into static.

The capacity to manipulate magnetic fields, to affect matter on the ionic level, and now this mysterious reference to the voodoo term for the soul. I realized we had no idea of this man’s potential. My imagination was fueled by the sinister materials of the project, and I was stricken by a vision of Harrison crumbling cities with a gesture and raising armies of the dead. I suggested to Stellings that we bring him in, but he told me the risks were ‘acceptable.’ He did not believe, as I was coming to, that Harrison might be one of the most dangerous individuals who had ever lived. Of course Stellings had no knowledge of Otille Rigaud… or did he? Perhaps there was no end to the convolution of this circumstance. It seemed to unravel by process of its own laws, otherworldly ones, like a curining tapestry of black lace worked with tiny figures, whose depicted actions foreshadowed our lives.

And then came the night of July 26, 1987, a night during which all my fears were brought home to me. I had been asleep for nearly an hour, not really asleep, drowsing, listening to the rain and the wind against the dormer window, when I thought I heard a footfall in the corridor. Though this was hardly likely - my security system being extensive - I sat up in bed, listening more closely. Nothing. The only movement was the rectangle of white streetlight cast on the far wall, marred by opaque splotches of rain and whirling leaf shadow. I settled back.

Once again I heard a sound, the glide of something along the hallway carpet. This time I switched on the bedside lamp, and there, framed in the door, was a preposterous old man with shoulder-length white hair and wearing a loose-fitting shirt decorated, it seemed to my bleary eyes, with the image of a blue serpent (I later saw this was actually the word Self-rising, the imprint of a flour company). ‘Goddamn, he’s a big one, him,’ said the old man to someone out of sight around the corner. A second figure appeared in the doorway, and a third, and I understood why my burglar alarms had failed. It was Verret, troubled-looking, and beside her, disguised by a pair of mirrored glasses, was Harrison. He had gained weight, especially in the shoulders, but he was still gaunt. His hair had grown long, framing his face, giving him a piratical air.

‘Edman,’ he said.

The word was phrased as an epithet, containing such a wealth of viciousness I almost did not recognize it as my name.

His movements revealing no sign of debility, he picked up a straight-backed chair, carried it to the bed and sat next to me. How can I tell you my feelings at that moment, the effect he had upon me? I have stated that the patients were charismatic in the extreme, but Harrison’s personal force was beyond anything of my experience. To put it simply, I was terrified. His anima wrapped around me like an electrified fist, immobilizing and vibrant, and I stared helplessly at my agog reflection in his mirrored lenses. The wind rattled the window, branches ticked the glass, as if heralding his presence. I wondered how Verret and the old man could be so at ease with him. Did they not notice, or had they become acclimatized to his aura of power? And what of his patients? Were all faith healers equally potent beings? Could it be that the power to heal was in part conferred by the faithful upon the healer, and this exchange of energies immunized the patients against awe? It is, I believe, a testament to the rigorous discipline of my education that, despite my fear, I was able to make a mental note to investigate the subject.

‘Any successes lately with the new strain?’ he asked.

I am not sure what I expected him to say, a threat perhaps, an insult, but certainly not this. ‘Two,’ I managed to gasp.

Expressionless, he absorbed the information. ‘Edman,’ he said, ‘I need money, a place to work unimpeded, and a guaranteed freedom of movement. Can you supply it?’

I wish I had said that I could offer no guarantees, that the CIA was involved and I no longer had substantive control of the project; then he might have accorded me a measure of confidence. But as it was, I obeyed the reflexes of my office and said, ‘Come back to the project, Donnell. We’ll take care of you.’

‘I bet,’ he said, and here his voice became resonant for the space of a few syllables, the voice of a ghost rather than a man. ‘I should be taking care of you. You’re quite ill, you know.’ He turned to the old man and gestured toward the door. ‘See if there’s anything around we can use, okay?’ And then to Verret: ‘He’s totally untrustworthy. One second frightened, the next scheming. Do you have any money?’ he asked, turning back to me.

I pointed to my trousers hanging on the clothes rack. Verret went over and emptied my wallet of bills. I felt sudden hostility toward her, seeing her as the betrayer of our mutual cause, and I commented on her thievery.

‘Thief?’ She lashed out at me. ‘You ghoul! Don’t call me names!’

‘Don’t waste your breath on him.’ Harrison regarded me with displeasure. ‘He’s just random molecules bound together by the stickum of his education.’

Normally I would have been infuriated by such a description, but he said it with kindness, with pity, and for the moment I accepted it as accurate, a sad but true diagnosis. This, and the fact that during our encounter I was prone to fits of depression, a characteristic I had associated with Harrison, led me to wonder whether or not his energies were materially affecting my thought processes.

Verret left to join the old man in his search, and Harrison gazed at me thoughtfully. ‘Get up,’ he said. He pushed back his chair and stood.

I was afraid he was about to harm me. My fear may seem to you irrational; I was, after all, a much larger man, and I might well have been able to overpower both him and Verret, though the old man had a wiry, dangerous look. Yet I was very afraid.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, thoroughly disgusted. He removed his sunglasses. ‘I’m going to try to cure you.’

As he moved his hands above my head, concentrating his efforts at the base of my skull, I lost track of the storm, the others in the house, and was caught up in the manner of my healing. Mild electric shocks tingled me from head to foot, my ears were filled with oscillating hums. Once in a while violent shocks caused my muscles to spasm, and after each of these I experienced a feeling of - I am hesitant to use the term, but can think of no other - spirituality. Not the warm bona fides of Jesus as advertised by the Council of Churches. Hardly. It was a cold immateriality that embraced me, that elevated my thoughts, sent them questing after a higher plane; it was less a palpable cold than a mental rigor, one implying an icy sensibility in whose clutch I foundered. I had an image of myself lying in a gold-green scaly palm, tiny as a charm. Was this the biochemistry of salvation in action, an instance of Harrison’s effect releasing spiritual endorphins? Or was it the overlapping of his sensibility with my own? I only know that each sight I had of the flashes within his eyes gave credence to my newfound apprehension of the supernatural.

‘Sorry,’ he said at last. ‘It’s going to take too long. A day or more, I’d guess.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe you should have one of the new patients check you over.’ (And I would have, had not the project been taken from me.) He must have forgotten that Verret had left the room, for he half-turned and spoke over his shoulder, assuming her presence, saying, ‘If this works out, we should think about setting the others loose. There’s no…’ Then, realizing she was elsewhere, a puzzled expression crossed his face.

‘What is the gros bon ange?’ I blurted. ‘What are you intending to do?’ I was still frightened, but the character of my fear had changed. It was the unknown quantity he represented that assailed me, and I was desperate to understand.

‘The gros bon ange?’ His voice became resonant and hollow again, gusting at me like a wind from a cave, merging with the howling wind outside. ‘A dream, a vision, or maybe it’s the shadow a dog sees slipping out of an open coffin.’ Then his voice reverted to normal, and he described what he had seen.

I am not sure why he humored my question. Boredom, perhaps, or it may have been simply that he had no reason to hide anything from me. There were, he said, three types, the most commonplace a black figure in which prisms of light whirled chaotically. The second most common type seemed to exert a measure of control over its inner fires (his term), able to form of them faces, simple patterns; and the rarest, a type of whom he had seen only three, were capable of wielding extensive control, even to the point of sending bursts of light shooting from their fingers.

‘As to what I intend,’ he said, ‘I intend to live, Edman.

I’m going to build the veve of a voodoo god out of copper. Three tons of copper.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose you know about veves, though.’

Indeed, I assured him, I did know, having done quite a bit of reading on the subject of vaudou, this at the urging of Ms Verret.

‘Oh?’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Tell me about Ogoun Badagris.’

‘One of the aspects of Ogoun,’ I said, ‘who is essentially the warrior hero of the pantheon. I believe that Ogoun Badagris is associated with wizardry. A rada aspect.’

‘Rada?’

‘Yes. Rada and petro are more or less equivalent to white and black magic. Good and evil.’

‘And which is rada?’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said softly, more to himself than to me, ‘I guess I should be thankful for that.’

He went on to tell me of a plan he had, hardly a plan, more a vague compulsion to act in some direction, and though the action was as yet unclear, as the days passed the parameters of the deed were defining themselves. Something decisive, he said, something dangerous. It was evident to me that he was evolving past the human, and I was in mortal terror of the vibrant devil he was coming to be. I lay half hypnotized, helpless before him, the tongues of his words tasting me, licking me prior to taking a bite. Finally Verret and the old man returned; he was carrying a brandy bottle and she a coil of rope. Without further ado they gagged me and lashed me to the bed, and afterwards Harrison asked me to break free if I could. Ordinarily I would have pretended to struggle, but at his behest I shook the bed in earnest.

And then they were gone, gone to Maravillosa, swallowed up and gone beyond the reach of the CIA, the project, and for all I know beyond the hand of God Himself. We had no word of them until news came of Harrison’s actions on Bayou Rigaud.

I may well have met Otille Rigaud; however, from all reports, it is unlikely I would have forgotten the occasion. She was a woman who traveled freely through the various strata of society, and the mention of her name was sufficient to cause highly respected citizens to cough, make their excuses, and leave the room. I wish that I had met her. Though many have tried to explain the events which occurred upon Bayou Rigaud, she alone might have illuminated them. Stacked on my writing table at this moment is page after page of dubious yet accurate explanation. Data sheets, medical records, government documents. For example, here we have the results of an autopsy performed on an unidentified body, citing one hundred and seventy separate fractures caused by the instantaneous degeneration of bone tissue, blood clots, cell damage, crushed spinal ganglia, and so forth. Appended is a telephone-book-sized study exploring the victim’s agony, which must have been substantial, and speculating on the nature of the forces that came into play. I will quote from the summary section.

…Movements of the Ezawa bacteria within the brains of Subjects One and Two created electrical currents which interacted with the electrical functions of the neurons, thereby enabling them to intuit the direction of the geomagnetic field. The copper device, aside from its function of conductivity, seems to have acted as a topological junction, its design such that all possible formulae of energy manipulation - the vibrational and rotational states of electrons, spin states of magnetic nuclei - were reduced to the choreographed movements of an electrical field (either Subject One or Two) within the geomagnetic field. Together with the device, the subjects became dynamos. They provided the current fed through the device, which in turn fed a magnetic field back through their bodies. Dependent on the exact choreography, the field could attain a potential strength of at least several hundred thousand times that of the geomagnetic field.

‘The energies redirected through the bodies of both subjects must have been of sufficient strength to disrupt in coherent fashion their atomic structures. Bulman hypothesizes there may have been a particular reaction involved with the hemoglobin. Electrons were raised to higher energy states, unipolar fields were created at the fingertips of the subjects, and photons transmitted along the lines of the fields. The emission of light visible in the tapes resulted from energy loss when the electrons dropped back to lower energy states. Essentially, the physical damage sustained by Subject One occurred when his nuclei absorbed enough radiation to flip their orientation and align with Subject Two’s field, this being a structural irony his component particles could not maintain…

All well and good. But none of this speaks to the absolute question: Can the events on Bayou Rigaud be taken at face value, or were more consequential historical actions involved? It may be unanswerable. It may be that when we peer over the extreme edge of human experience, we will find nothing but mute darkness. Or, and this is my conviction, it may be that there is a process of nature too large for us to perceive, an ultimate conjoining of the physics of coincidence and probability, wherein an infinite number of events, events as minuscule as two people meeting in the street and as grandiose as a resurrection, combine and each take on radiant meanings so as to enact an improbable and magical fate. But my own answer aside, I prefer above the rest that given me by an old Cajun woman whom I interviewed preparatory to beginning this memoir. At the very least, it does not beg the question.

‘Le Bon Dieu He got riled at all the funny doin’s down on Bayou Rigaud,’ she said. ‘So He raised up The Green-eyed Man to do battle wit His ancient enemy.’