From: "David Hearne" <ottercrk@sover.net>
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 13:49:31 -0400
Subject: xfc: REPOST: Thoughts at 11:21 P.M. (1 of 1)
Source: xfc

TITLE: THOUGHTS AT 11:21 P.M. (1 of 1)

AUTHOR: DAVID HEARNE

CLASSIFICATION: Post-ep for "The Pilot"

DISTRIBUTION: Available to anyone.

RATING: PG

Send feedback to ottercrk@sover.net

Website is located at http://members.dencity.com/hearne

AUTHOR'S NOTE: For the next eight days, I will be posting stories for
the premieres and finales of the past seasons. Some of them will be
new, some of them will be old.

Nice to have a theme, don't you think?

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No light can help you to see this object hiding in the dark. You can
only feel it. Notice both the rough edges and smooth curves. It may be
soft as skin in some places, but wet blood moistens its sharp points.
Can you carry it? Knock on the surface and you can hear the echo of a
hollow body. However, you suspect that it would be impossible to lift
from the ground.

It is a contradiction in solid form. It may be your life.

You walked into your superior's office, feeling very much the
professional. The clothing on your body may have been a bit drab, but
it was a manifestation of your disdain for nonsense. Then your
superior told you that he was sending you into the heart of nonsense.

Down, down, down you went. You kept falling until you struck the very
bottom. You found the foolish dreams of humanity. Assembled into words
on a paper and buried in a photo's grainy image was improbable
folklore. You found the stories of people who had drifted into hidden
spaces and returned with warnings of monsters. This cramped office was
where the eccentrics banged their drums, where the recluses whimpered
into tape recorders, where the prophets shook their fists at the
skies.

He sat in the middle of it like a ringleader for a disreputable
circus. His expression had been guarded yet amused. When you greeted
him cordially, his replies were just short of dismissive. "You are not
wanted here" was the message in his smirk. Then he threw a mystery at
your feet, daring you to run. You didn't, even though your initial
reaction was bewilderment. You managed to meet his blithe sarcasm with
your faith in logic and the mathematically proven. You also decided
that this new work would be amusing, if not really useful.

Then the woods came. They brought twisted black corpses, metal hidden
inside flesh, marks branded onto skin, and the light. Your new partner
picked a spot and declared it unnatural. He spoke of time being
snatched like quarters from the pavement. He pointed the finger of
blame at a comatose teenager. None of it was false. None of it was
true. It was all merely unsubstantial. You might as well try to bottle
the wind as prove what happened in those woods.

You became angry at the mystery. Then you became scared -- so scared
that you shed your drab, professional clothing along with your claims
of objectivity. All you became concerned with was the marks on your
skin. You were one of those watched by the beast in the woods. You
were next. You weren't. He examined you by candlelight and assured you
everything was well. In that moment, he became your solid, unyielding
point in the middle of chaos. You held yourself to him. His body
stiffened in surprise, but he didn't pull away.

Then you felt foolish. You saw yourself acting like a child rushing to
her parents because of a nightmare.

"I feel so ridiculous," you said.

"Why?"

"To get so worked up over...mosquito bites."

"I would have been more concerned if you hadn't been worried. In this
situation, you can't be too careful."

You looked at him and said, "Or maybe I just let my imagination run
away with me."

His face hardened slightly. "Is that what you think about me? That
this is all just my imagination?"

Before you could say anything, he stood up. A smile was present on his
face, but it was the grim, defensive smile to which you had already
grown accustomed. He walked away from you, saying "After what you've
seen, you still think..."

"I don't know what to think."

He stopped with his back turned to you.

"Besides, you believed even before you came here. Why?"

He faced you and there was something different in his expression. He
seemed to be carefully judging you.

Then he sat down on the floor by the bed. "Because of something that
happened to me."

You moved to the bed and lay against the pillows. You listened to him
talk about a lost sister and lost memories and lost hopes. He told you
why he lives his life on the edge of belief. With his hands on your
arms, he warned you that secrets were being hidden by the ones to whom
you own allegiance.

You came to understand many things that night. The image of your
partner's face daubed with candlelight stays with you. It's a face
whose beauty rises from its contradictions -- the sensuality of his
full lips against the comical heft of his nose; the grimness of his
hazel eyes against his silly smirk; his blank expression against his
passions.

The face swims across the top of your memory along with the voice just
heard over the telephone. He had called you in the first deep hour of
night. This is the time when fantasy rises up as morning rests. You
think about him and wonder if he is thinking about you.

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She was a joke played on you. The powers that be tossed her into your
little playpen. She was bound to spoil your games. Official policy and
correctness had been sprayed on her like disinfectant on a toilet.
Even as you reminded her of the unconventional ideas in her past, she
still clung to the standard assertions of science. Worst of all, she
actually respected you. This meant she would eventually pity you. She
would feel sorry for the bright young lad who had degraded himself
into a crank.

If you were such a man, then you would be a patron saint of cranks.
You would be the father confessor of everyone with a strange tale. You
would strip yourself of your good reputation if that weighed you down
on your trip into the barely possible. You just wouldn't care.

Friends look at you with unease. They wonder if your unique
understanding of the criminal mind can be traced to a personal
neurosis of your own (if not a deep-seated insanity.) You will smile
at their unease. Under your smile is the certainty that your quest is
justified. Wide trails will be blazed in your footsteps. Your victory
will advance the understanding of life and God in ways only to be
dreamed.

At least, that's what you tell yourself on nights like this one. In
these late hours, such thoughts are the bulwark against guilt and
desperation. Behind your lofty declaration of beliefs are memories of
a little girl who had fallen though some unseen rabbit's hole. Where
is she now? Is this girl lost in a wonderland of light whimsy? Or does
blood drip from the grins of invisible cats? If you found her at
journey's end, would she fall in your arms out of relief or would she
spite you for your failure to save her?

These are the concerns of your mind along with memories of the woods.
As the night presses against you, you long for a person who will
listen to your fears. Then you remember a woman who came to you on a
rainy evening. She had exposed her naked back to you and begged for an
examination. You did as requested. The experience had been both sexual
and asexual. On one hand, you were dealing with a terror not to be
dismissed easily. On the other, her milky white skin was soft, her
body was shapely and her blue eyes were lovely even when poisoned with
anxiety. You were relieved to tell her all was well, then bewildered
to feel that shapely body press against you. You could have gloated at
this display of weakness. "So you're not so skeptical after all?" you
could have sneered. Instead, you just felt uncomfortable. It didn't
seem right for this confident woman to be unnerved. You could have
held her, but that didn't seem right, either.

You chose to show your own weakness in exchange for hers. What would
she say when she knew the truth? Would she see you as you saw yourself
in your most fragile moments -- a wounded twelve-year-old boy hiding
in the shell of an adult? A man obsessed with a failure which couldn't
even be properly remembered?

No. She just listened. What she heard was not a tale of an insanity's
origins, but a revelation of pain. You could never recall anyone else
who had accepted the simple fact of that pain. "I'm here to find the
truth,"she said. When had anybody examined your quest with that
intention? In the past, you had only dealt with mockery, politics and
evasion.

Now you have her.

That's why you phone her near the time of midnight. It's a brief
conversation, ending with assurances to be fulfilled in the morning.
You call her to report more mischief, but you also do it to hear her
voice. You want to make sure that -- for a brief time, at least --
your voice will receive another response other than the silence of
darkness. As on many nights before, you will touch the object hidden
in the shadows. Only this time, you will find the clasp of a woman's
tender hand.

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