TVP: Chapter 61
Happy Monday, my dearesteses.
A mockingbird was somewhere in the bare trees beyond them, singing someone else’s song.
Other than that, the world was quiet and blued white. The soldiers in the distance looked like grainy and indistinct in the flat light, like stock film from a silent movie as they laughed and jested inaudibly, clapping one another on the back as they passed in the changing of the guard.
“But everything finds an outlet, doesn’t it,” muttered Ocelot, under his breath. “An ultimate form of expression.”
Ivan paused, setting his lips, then speaking at last.
“I believe that it does, comrade.”
If i had to lose a mile
if I had to touch feelings-
I would lose my soul
the way I do
I don't have to think;
I only have to do it
the results are always perfect
…and that's old news
would you like to hear my voice
sweetened with emotion
invented at your birth?
I can't see the end of me
my whole expanse I cannot see
I formulate infinity
and store it deep inside of me (Meat Puppets)
Chapter 61.
They wasted little time once they got him inside.
Ocelot had been scowling but game throughout, dutifully reciting the prepared phrases each time the Latvian, Raudive, held up his broad palm and nodded.
His voice could be heard outside the booth, through the speakers above the soundboard. His tone was thoroughly underwhelmed.
Vasiliev, meanwhile, simply watched levels and manned dials.
“This part is not very exciting,” he explained apologetically to Raikov, who observed the process with a keenness that bordered on fervor. “Konstantin and I are merely recording the spaces between silence, the ether, if you will, where things vibrate that you and I cannot always hear.”
“What about the questions you’re having him ask? What are those?”
“Those are for the unseen- a prompt, for them to hopefully acknowledge and reply to.”
Vasiliev watched Ocelot’s eyes as they raised slowly to his left, as if watching a fly on the wall.
“I wonder…what he’s looking at,” he said, rapt, fingers stroking his neatly trimmed mustache.
It was about an hour later when they unlocked the soundproof glass and let him out.
Ocelot seemed oddly drained, somehow, and Raikov found it unsettling.
He had the dazed look of a man who’d been pistol-whipped into submission, and was existing five notches from unconsciousness.
“Take him outside,” said Vasiliev, in a sympathetic undertone. “Get him something to eat, some fresh air. Maybe a cup of tea.”
“Maybe a bottle of vodka,” muttered Ocelot.
Raikov frowned.
“Is he all right? Was there enough oxygen in there?”
“Plenty, plenty of air,” assured the old man, urging him toward the hall. “It’s not hypoxia, the issue with your lover. It’s his burden, which I believe we’ll prove soon enough. It isn’t easy, you know, being a conduit for the dead.”
“His what-” managed Ocelot, with wan, belated incredulity. “That word-”
Vasiliev patted him on the shoulder.
“Now, now. We’re going to listen through the tape, and amplify it a hundred times. When you come back, we should have some results.”
Raikov grasped Ocelot’s sleeve with a perfunctory jerk.
“Come on, comrade. Let’s get you a nip of something evil. Take a walk around the grounds with me.”
Adam’s mouth curled briefly, as if he wanted to say something profane or accusatory, but it lapsed quickly, leaving his lips to lie dormant.
Outside the rain was falling, and they paused beneath the shelter of the entry at the top of the stairs, while Ocelot fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket and glared at Raikov for a light.
“You don’t know what that was like,” he said, and his lips shook slightly. His eyes remained steady and damning, and Ivan lowered his own, briefly, to rest them from the weight of Adam’s stare.
“No,” admitted Raikov.
He pulled out his officer’s issue lighter and flicked the cap back with his index finger. The spear of flame bloomed to instant life and reached up to lick at the tip of Adam’s cigarette.
Ocelot was silent, inhaling, cheeks sucking inward and hollowing heavily. His eyes were closed.
Raikov’s mouth leapt in to fill the silence.
“But it’s something we need to know. We need every edge, ADAM. It impacts everything- the mission, your status.”
“…So you did this for the mission.”
Ivan faltered.
His thumb slid over the hammer and sickle embossed on the side of the lighter as he returned it to his pocket.
“No,” he said.
“No?” demanded Ocelot, succinctly, but the tone itself completed the prompt.
“I’m doing this because it’s you. Because this- ability- will either break or make you. And it could make you…phenomenal.”
He finished in a whisper.
Adam’s gaze was stony, inscrutable.
“You’re doing this for me.”
Ivan’s smile was slightly bitter.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Ocelot paused, hesitating, taking another drag. He seemed to have been struck speechless briefly, scowling into rain mist and ether.
So Ivan quietly reinforced his statement, with unvarnished honesty, which had a patina like concrete to his mind’s eye.
“It’s all for you, now.”
Adam coughed violently, and threw down the cigarette, where it hissed to its anticlimactic death in the rain-logged snow.
Ivan remained unyielding, in a classical soldier pose, eyes fixed ahead.
Adam leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how you even-” he broke off, shaking his head.
“My mother,” said Raikov, quietly, saving this new, weary Adam the effort of clarification. “My mother had some abilities. The government found her…interesting. The people found her helpful. She could predict events. Crop outcomes, the sex of children, deaths, misfortunes. She would tell village girls to gather seven wildflowers on midsummer’s night, press them between a book and give them to her. If she slept with them under her pillow, she would dream of the man they were destined to marry.”
He gazed out through the dissipating rain. It was now only water vapor. Days became dusk early, and blue shadows were already closing in from all sides, blunting the highlights from the world. Making everything hazy. Diffuse and flat.
Ivan took this all in idly, seeing the world swath in on itself, even as the man beside him felt ever more real. He was keenly aware of Adam in that moment. Aware of him, his bitten-back pain, his wan ordeal in the sound booth that had left him shaken and clenching his hands for purchase on his convictions and perceptions of reality. In his silence there were uncounted declarations.
Raikov lowered his eyes.
“It always skips a generation, they say. Although…to be honest, I don’t rightly know. It certainly skipped over me, although I have a more pedestrian sixth sense of a kind. In my dealings with people, I instinctively read. I know what they want, and how to provide it.”
He shrugged, glancing at Ocelot as if expecting him to be ambivalent, but found him listening intently, glaring with narrow-eyed concentration.
Ivan raised an eyebrow and continued.
“If you’ll humor an objective layman’s clumsy perversion of a genius explanation, it seems like…there are two extremes of hyper-sentient emotive personality, apart from the median man, who merely exists and accepts. The emotionally expressed, and the emotionally repressed.”
Ocelot’s lips tightened briefly, but he nodded for Raikov to continue.
“I’ve humored your other clumsy perversions,” he muttered.
Ivan was relieved at the slight, and the quick flash of a smile betrayed this, but otherwise he gave no sign.
“The emotionally expressed exhibit markedly increased intuition and empathy. Social intelligence, I recall Thorndike dubbed it, but you might as easily call it simply charm.”
He met Adam’s eyes, then, hesitant.
“The emotionally repressed, on the other hand, have all the same sensitivity- but for whatever reason, whether organic or self-inflicted, the usual outlet isn’t open to them.”
A mockingbird was somewhere in the bare trees beyond them, singing someone else’s song.
Other than that, the world was quiet and blued white. The soldiers in the distance looked like grainy and indistinct in the flat light, like stock film from a silent movie as they laughed and jested inaudibly, clapping one another on the back as they passed in the changing of the guard.
“But everything finds an outlet, doesn’t it,” muttered Ocelot, under his breath. “An ultimate form of expression.”
Ivan paused, setting his lips, then speaking at last.
“I believe that it does, comrade.”
“That’s not enough,” declared Ocelot, sharply. “The mechanism. How exactly does one go from merely antisocial to a metaphysical telegraph?”
The Major shook his head.
“I can only tell you the theory that was given in Charm School, when we reviewed case studies of special operatives who manifested such abilities.”
Adam snorted.
“If it’s good enough for the KGB, it’s good enough for me. Spill.”
Raikov frowned thoughtfully, trying to form a cohesive explanation of the inexplicable, and after a moment, he segued back into soliloquy.
“You see, it’s essentially like this. In the emotive man with no psychological barriers, the sentiments and feelings flow outward, always, like the Volga. However, in the emotional man whose work or life demands the suppression of that all that energy, it’s as if the Volga was dammed to create a reservoir. The emotions are willfully, or unconsciously held back, and they build to a fever pitch, an incredible tension. And that tension hums with a frequency that we don’t understand. But that man essentially has become a radio, with a very rarified bandwidth.”
Ocelot’s lips pressed together, as he waited for Raikov to pick up again.
He knew all this, didn’t he? It was an indigenous wisdom, or maybe it was hard-learned, but he was no stranger to the precepts and conclusions that Ivan proffered now. Part of him wanted to tell him to shut his mouth, to leave well enough alone, but at the same time, hearing the validation of his deepest and most silent suspicions spoken out loud was cathartic and cauterizing. There was a gruesome satisfaction in being so intractably right about your own darkness.
Except that for the first time, he didn’t feel the stricture of that darkness hovering in the periphery.
There was nothing dark about what surrounded him now, from the fading auburn light and blue-shadowed snow, to Raikov’s brilliant blond mane, indolently capless, and buffeted gently by the wind.
The Major tossed his hair from his eyes, keeping them trained on the horizon.
“According to Dr. Vasiliev, the organism learns to mitigate his affliction. Mediate it. From time to time it might find spontaneous release in fits of violence or anger. Alcohol and Russian roulette. Casual sexual encounters and neurotic breakdowns. Even unprovoked crying spells.”
Ocelot made a face.
“…Things that take the edge off, and keep the dam from bursting, destroying everything in its path. Or, to put it another way, if the kettle can be kept below a boil, theoretically, there should be no psychic vibration, and the man remains unreceptive.”
“And that keeps things on an even keel,” muttered Ocelot, hand curling around the stock of his gun. “Keeps the door closed.”
“Yes,” said Raikov, staring at him. “It’s called bleeding the wall.”
“Go on.”
“It can succeed indefinitely in denying the phenomena from expressing itself. The mind has a powerful sense of self-preservation. But that approach only works as long as the subject can keep detached enough to release a little trickle of pressure on the outside, without hemorrhaging internally.”
“But wouldn’t letting everything out undercut the circuit?” demanded Ocelot, skeptically. “Drain the reserve and end all transmissions?”
His gun twirled manically in his hand like a child’s possessed pinwheel.
Raikov turned to meet his eyes, and shook his head.
“No,” he said, quietly. “Think of an abscess. It can be lanced and drained to ease the infection, but that isn’t the same as if it should burst inside the body, releasing all its toxins into the blood.”
Ocelot’s face contorted into a violent grimace.
“That’s repulsive,” he charged, petulantly.
Ivan laughed softly, rubbing his brow.
“All right, if you’re going to be a girl’s blouse about it. All I’m saying is this. Those unexamined emotive implosions are like flares in the night, and they draw moths, comrade, because they open the floodgates to all that untapped power.”
He risked giving Ocelot a lazy, fond smile.
“Is that better?”
“Anything is better, Major.”
Ocelot scowled at his Makarov, rubbing fiercely at the tarnish on the barrel.
He hated mythology.
Pandora, Prometheus. The evils of the world and divine fire.
He hated metaphors more.
“But then you miss the most important part of the concept,” said Raikov, thoughtfully. “Because once contaminated, the blood is always susceptible.”
“Try again,” muttered Ocelot, cringing. “That’s still fucking repugnant.”
“It can be very difficult to put the imp back in the bottle,” added Raikov, cryptically.
You can’t unring the bell.
Adam was silent, pondering the nature of this gift-cum-curse, and whether in fact he could turn it to his advantage.
If he could, it would be foolish not to. More than foolish. It would be outside his character, the man called ADAM, and the one in the ultimate cockpit who piloted them all.
Ivan was looking at him. His gaze was unshielded and penetrating, as if weighing the density of his bones.
“We can go back to the lab now. Are you ready?”
Ocelot clicked the hammer of his gun, spun it and holstered it once more.
His eyes were cool and resolute.
“You know how I was born.”
Raikov smiled, relieved.
“Remind me.”
A mockingbird was somewhere in the bare trees beyond them, singing someone else’s song.
Other than that, the world was quiet and blued white. The soldiers in the distance looked like grainy and indistinct in the flat light, like stock film from a silent movie as they laughed and jested inaudibly, clapping one another on the back as they passed in the changing of the guard.
“But everything finds an outlet, doesn’t it,” muttered Ocelot, under his breath. “An ultimate form of expression.”
Ivan paused, setting his lips, then speaking at last.
“I believe that it does, comrade.”
If i had to lose a mile
if I had to touch feelings-
I would lose my soul
the way I do
I don't have to think;
I only have to do it
the results are always perfect
…and that's old news
would you like to hear my voice
sweetened with emotion
invented at your birth?
I can't see the end of me
my whole expanse I cannot see
I formulate infinity
and store it deep inside of me (Meat Puppets)
Chapter 61.
They wasted little time once they got him inside.
Ocelot had been scowling but game throughout, dutifully reciting the prepared phrases each time the Latvian, Raudive, held up his broad palm and nodded.
His voice could be heard outside the booth, through the speakers above the soundboard. His tone was thoroughly underwhelmed.
Vasiliev, meanwhile, simply watched levels and manned dials.
“This part is not very exciting,” he explained apologetically to Raikov, who observed the process with a keenness that bordered on fervor. “Konstantin and I are merely recording the spaces between silence, the ether, if you will, where things vibrate that you and I cannot always hear.”
“What about the questions you’re having him ask? What are those?”
“Those are for the unseen- a prompt, for them to hopefully acknowledge and reply to.”
Vasiliev watched Ocelot’s eyes as they raised slowly to his left, as if watching a fly on the wall.
“I wonder…what he’s looking at,” he said, rapt, fingers stroking his neatly trimmed mustache.
It was about an hour later when they unlocked the soundproof glass and let him out.
Ocelot seemed oddly drained, somehow, and Raikov found it unsettling.
He had the dazed look of a man who’d been pistol-whipped into submission, and was existing five notches from unconsciousness.
“Take him outside,” said Vasiliev, in a sympathetic undertone. “Get him something to eat, some fresh air. Maybe a cup of tea.”
“Maybe a bottle of vodka,” muttered Ocelot.
Raikov frowned.
“Is he all right? Was there enough oxygen in there?”
“Plenty, plenty of air,” assured the old man, urging him toward the hall. “It’s not hypoxia, the issue with your lover. It’s his burden, which I believe we’ll prove soon enough. It isn’t easy, you know, being a conduit for the dead.”
“His what-” managed Ocelot, with wan, belated incredulity. “That word-”
Vasiliev patted him on the shoulder.
“Now, now. We’re going to listen through the tape, and amplify it a hundred times. When you come back, we should have some results.”
Raikov grasped Ocelot’s sleeve with a perfunctory jerk.
“Come on, comrade. Let’s get you a nip of something evil. Take a walk around the grounds with me.”
Adam’s mouth curled briefly, as if he wanted to say something profane or accusatory, but it lapsed quickly, leaving his lips to lie dormant.
Outside the rain was falling, and they paused beneath the shelter of the entry at the top of the stairs, while Ocelot fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket and glared at Raikov for a light.
“You don’t know what that was like,” he said, and his lips shook slightly. His eyes remained steady and damning, and Ivan lowered his own, briefly, to rest them from the weight of Adam’s stare.
“No,” admitted Raikov.
He pulled out his officer’s issue lighter and flicked the cap back with his index finger. The spear of flame bloomed to instant life and reached up to lick at the tip of Adam’s cigarette.
Ocelot was silent, inhaling, cheeks sucking inward and hollowing heavily. His eyes were closed.
Raikov’s mouth leapt in to fill the silence.
“But it’s something we need to know. We need every edge, ADAM. It impacts everything- the mission, your status.”
“…So you did this for the mission.”
Ivan faltered.
His thumb slid over the hammer and sickle embossed on the side of the lighter as he returned it to his pocket.
“No,” he said.
“No?” demanded Ocelot, succinctly, but the tone itself completed the prompt.
“I’m doing this because it’s you. Because this- ability- will either break or make you. And it could make you…phenomenal.”
He finished in a whisper.
Adam’s gaze was stony, inscrutable.
“You’re doing this for me.”
Ivan’s smile was slightly bitter.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Ocelot paused, hesitating, taking another drag. He seemed to have been struck speechless briefly, scowling into rain mist and ether.
So Ivan quietly reinforced his statement, with unvarnished honesty, which had a patina like concrete to his mind’s eye.
“It’s all for you, now.”
Adam coughed violently, and threw down the cigarette, where it hissed to its anticlimactic death in the rain-logged snow.
Ivan remained unyielding, in a classical soldier pose, eyes fixed ahead.
Adam leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how you even-” he broke off, shaking his head.
“My mother,” said Raikov, quietly, saving this new, weary Adam the effort of clarification. “My mother had some abilities. The government found her…interesting. The people found her helpful. She could predict events. Crop outcomes, the sex of children, deaths, misfortunes. She would tell village girls to gather seven wildflowers on midsummer’s night, press them between a book and give them to her. If she slept with them under her pillow, she would dream of the man they were destined to marry.”
He gazed out through the dissipating rain. It was now only water vapor. Days became dusk early, and blue shadows were already closing in from all sides, blunting the highlights from the world. Making everything hazy. Diffuse and flat.
Ivan took this all in idly, seeing the world swath in on itself, even as the man beside him felt ever more real. He was keenly aware of Adam in that moment. Aware of him, his bitten-back pain, his wan ordeal in the sound booth that had left him shaken and clenching his hands for purchase on his convictions and perceptions of reality. In his silence there were uncounted declarations.
Raikov lowered his eyes.
“It always skips a generation, they say. Although…to be honest, I don’t rightly know. It certainly skipped over me, although I have a more pedestrian sixth sense of a kind. In my dealings with people, I instinctively read. I know what they want, and how to provide it.”
He shrugged, glancing at Ocelot as if expecting him to be ambivalent, but found him listening intently, glaring with narrow-eyed concentration.
Ivan raised an eyebrow and continued.
“If you’ll humor an objective layman’s clumsy perversion of a genius explanation, it seems like…there are two extremes of hyper-sentient emotive personality, apart from the median man, who merely exists and accepts. The emotionally expressed, and the emotionally repressed.”
Ocelot’s lips tightened briefly, but he nodded for Raikov to continue.
“I’ve humored your other clumsy perversions,” he muttered.
Ivan was relieved at the slight, and the quick flash of a smile betrayed this, but otherwise he gave no sign.
“The emotionally expressed exhibit markedly increased intuition and empathy. Social intelligence, I recall Thorndike dubbed it, but you might as easily call it simply charm.”
He met Adam’s eyes, then, hesitant.
“The emotionally repressed, on the other hand, have all the same sensitivity- but for whatever reason, whether organic or self-inflicted, the usual outlet isn’t open to them.”
A mockingbird was somewhere in the bare trees beyond them, singing someone else’s song.
Other than that, the world was quiet and blued white. The soldiers in the distance looked like grainy and indistinct in the flat light, like stock film from a silent movie as they laughed and jested inaudibly, clapping one another on the back as they passed in the changing of the guard.
“But everything finds an outlet, doesn’t it,” muttered Ocelot, under his breath. “An ultimate form of expression.”
Ivan paused, setting his lips, then speaking at last.
“I believe that it does, comrade.”
“That’s not enough,” declared Ocelot, sharply. “The mechanism. How exactly does one go from merely antisocial to a metaphysical telegraph?”
The Major shook his head.
“I can only tell you the theory that was given in Charm School, when we reviewed case studies of special operatives who manifested such abilities.”
Adam snorted.
“If it’s good enough for the KGB, it’s good enough for me. Spill.”
Raikov frowned thoughtfully, trying to form a cohesive explanation of the inexplicable, and after a moment, he segued back into soliloquy.
“You see, it’s essentially like this. In the emotive man with no psychological barriers, the sentiments and feelings flow outward, always, like the Volga. However, in the emotional man whose work or life demands the suppression of that all that energy, it’s as if the Volga was dammed to create a reservoir. The emotions are willfully, or unconsciously held back, and they build to a fever pitch, an incredible tension. And that tension hums with a frequency that we don’t understand. But that man essentially has become a radio, with a very rarified bandwidth.”
Ocelot’s lips pressed together, as he waited for Raikov to pick up again.
He knew all this, didn’t he? It was an indigenous wisdom, or maybe it was hard-learned, but he was no stranger to the precepts and conclusions that Ivan proffered now. Part of him wanted to tell him to shut his mouth, to leave well enough alone, but at the same time, hearing the validation of his deepest and most silent suspicions spoken out loud was cathartic and cauterizing. There was a gruesome satisfaction in being so intractably right about your own darkness.
Except that for the first time, he didn’t feel the stricture of that darkness hovering in the periphery.
There was nothing dark about what surrounded him now, from the fading auburn light and blue-shadowed snow, to Raikov’s brilliant blond mane, indolently capless, and buffeted gently by the wind.
The Major tossed his hair from his eyes, keeping them trained on the horizon.
“According to Dr. Vasiliev, the organism learns to mitigate his affliction. Mediate it. From time to time it might find spontaneous release in fits of violence or anger. Alcohol and Russian roulette. Casual sexual encounters and neurotic breakdowns. Even unprovoked crying spells.”
Ocelot made a face.
“…Things that take the edge off, and keep the dam from bursting, destroying everything in its path. Or, to put it another way, if the kettle can be kept below a boil, theoretically, there should be no psychic vibration, and the man remains unreceptive.”
“And that keeps things on an even keel,” muttered Ocelot, hand curling around the stock of his gun. “Keeps the door closed.”
“Yes,” said Raikov, staring at him. “It’s called bleeding the wall.”
“Go on.”
“It can succeed indefinitely in denying the phenomena from expressing itself. The mind has a powerful sense of self-preservation. But that approach only works as long as the subject can keep detached enough to release a little trickle of pressure on the outside, without hemorrhaging internally.”
“But wouldn’t letting everything out undercut the circuit?” demanded Ocelot, skeptically. “Drain the reserve and end all transmissions?”
His gun twirled manically in his hand like a child’s possessed pinwheel.
Raikov turned to meet his eyes, and shook his head.
“No,” he said, quietly. “Think of an abscess. It can be lanced and drained to ease the infection, but that isn’t the same as if it should burst inside the body, releasing all its toxins into the blood.”
Ocelot’s face contorted into a violent grimace.
“That’s repulsive,” he charged, petulantly.
Ivan laughed softly, rubbing his brow.
“All right, if you’re going to be a girl’s blouse about it. All I’m saying is this. Those unexamined emotive implosions are like flares in the night, and they draw moths, comrade, because they open the floodgates to all that untapped power.”
He risked giving Ocelot a lazy, fond smile.
“Is that better?”
“Anything is better, Major.”
Ocelot scowled at his Makarov, rubbing fiercely at the tarnish on the barrel.
He hated mythology.
Pandora, Prometheus. The evils of the world and divine fire.
He hated metaphors more.
“But then you miss the most important part of the concept,” said Raikov, thoughtfully. “Because once contaminated, the blood is always susceptible.”
“Try again,” muttered Ocelot, cringing. “That’s still fucking repugnant.”
“It can be very difficult to put the imp back in the bottle,” added Raikov, cryptically.
You can’t unring the bell.
Adam was silent, pondering the nature of this gift-cum-curse, and whether in fact he could turn it to his advantage.
If he could, it would be foolish not to. More than foolish. It would be outside his character, the man called ADAM, and the one in the ultimate cockpit who piloted them all.
Ivan was looking at him. His gaze was unshielded and penetrating, as if weighing the density of his bones.
“We can go back to the lab now. Are you ready?”
Ocelot clicked the hammer of his gun, spun it and holstered it once more.
His eyes were cool and resolute.
“You know how I was born.”
Raikov smiled, relieved.
“Remind me.”