The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End 1949, an audit, Slepien, Arnett and Morton are discussing how those with extreme psychological disorders might react to the tests carried out on their engineer, Edouard Schuller, which has resulted in him conversing with the dead. Meetings with Theodor Reich, whose research in Facebook, her secret self, have been rich and varied.
One line of inquiry involves the work of French neurologist, Jules Cotard, into a condition that renders those afflicted believing they have no blood and that their body is without organs. Ultimately, it causes them to think that they are dead. When Reich tells of hushed rumours alluding to a notebook containing instructions on how to induce Cotard's syndrome, Audents are captivated. They speculate on deploying their two-ring table on those who believe they were already deceased. Would this alter the dynamics of communication with the otherworld voices? Could they transform carriers into necromancing drones by playing hooks from regular vinyl records? Having spent months unearthing stories that corroborate a rumor which locates the notebook in Paris,
it is decided Slepien will return to France for the first time since the Ghost Army departed after World War II. his nomination due to Apache knowledge of the language garnered from reading Proust a la Recherche de Tom Perdue. On board a TWA Lockheed constellation, he sits down, heaves a trepidatious sigh, and prepares for the 20-hour trip from New York's Idlewild Airport. His journey's reading consists of texts pertaining to Qatar, but it is a single sheet of paper concerning a bio of esoteric medical documents that absorbs him. His information about Isabelle Chimay is scant, consistent of her home address,
and the name of the Milak Bar of Yen and the 11th Arrondissement that she's known to frequent on weekends. That his trip is solely based upon a faint, serendipitous meeting with her here seems wildly optimistic, but it is all he has. It is early Thursday evening when he touches down on a cheaply perfumed bed in the illustrously shabby Alba Opera Hotel in the centre of Paris and Slepien is bone-weary from the din of sleep-repelling propellers. Still exhausted, he spends Friday recovering, mulling over his plot to Hornswoggle, an unsuspecting collector of texts.
Whilst his knowledge of Cotard's work is his first weapon of seduction, his second is a vial of amobarbital, otherwise known as truth serum, a drug used by the US military to treat shell shock so that soldiers could return to the front line. On Saturday night, Slepien's line is the Malak doorway, which he crosses at 6.35pm with a distorted gate due to the bottle of wine he has already consumed. Inside, he sits close to the door in order to hear the verbal exchanges between patrons and staff, for he has no idea what Miss Chimay looks like. Three glasses of a 1945 Pomeroy Bordeaux Inn, and Slepien, from behind a glazed patina
of nerves, observes the entrance of a serenely upright lady. With a staccato sophistication, fleshed out by rapid steps, her presence demands action. The maitre d'is snaps to attention, as do Slepien's senses, upon hearing the greeting to Madame Chimay. Hands gesture towards a table that has obviously been kept for her. Slepien's plan was to wait for an opportune moment, but alcohol has sequestered his guile, so in broken French he brazenly introduces himself. With a confident, quizzical smile, Miss Chimay invites him to sit. and so the ersatz encounter begins. They talk politics, music, and finally perceptual disorders.
The phantom topic haunting Slepien's every word. Isabella is forthright and passionate when revealing her penchant for rare medical documents. She states that her ability to speak English is due to long hours spent translating letters from the 1860s. Ruminating on phantom leg syndrome, the dispatches formed a small part of the Civil War correspondence between American poet Walt Whitman, whilst he dressed rooms at Union hospitals, and Silas Weir Mitchell, a doctor of nerves from Philadelphia. Penned after having worked an emotionally wrought three years consoling dying and recovering soldiers, Whitman iterated to Weir his belief that he was of most use when he healed parts
that doctors couldn't touch, psychological extremities he called the deepest remains. What particularly gripped Isabel, however, was an exchange from the Battle of Bullrun. Weir reported that a number of the amputees talked at length about sensory ghosts, feelings that incorporated painful missing limbs, a revenant flesh that haunted soldiers' severed bodies. Slepien clinically pitches the conversation towards Cotard and the research undertaken in Vauves.
Isabelle parlays, but doesn't air ownership of his writings. He cogitates on whether he should be more amorous, but in truth he doesn't have the charismatic ordinance to pull it off. Instead, he expresses his desire to see her collection. apprehensively Isabelle agrees but organises for a visit to her apartment the following afternoon her next move is more categorical though as she stands and promptly leaves it is an overcast September Sunday afternoon and yesterday's excesses have rendered Paris Purcham an expressionist painting a dark human not lost on Slepien, even in his angular state.
His senses customarily function as portals, converting external stimuli that are processed to engage and orient his body. Today, though, they wheeze like decrepit vacuum cleaners, lethargically sucking up information and sending it to the grotty grey bag of fuzz that is his brain. In sharp contrast, a resplendent Isabelle Chimay, attired in sheer, black button-down dress, ushers him into her apartment. As a gift, Sleppy and Hansa records that he speciously relates as coming from an open-air market, Charlie Parker's Bird on 52nd Street,
and, in the beginning, by Milt Jackson and Sonny Stitt. He was unsure whether she would like them or not, but more importantly, for 45 minutes or so, the gesture assuaged Slepien's guilt for what he was about to embark on. Isabelle invites Slepien to sit in an uncomfortable Art Deco iron chair and asks whether he has heard of the recently deceased French theatre director, Antonin Attaud. He hasn't, but motions for her to carry on. Whilst interested in his work, it's his Gnostic beliefs that intrigued her. She proposes that he was in fact held in the grips of Kota'a's syndrome when he declared he had no mouths, no tongue, no teeth, no larynx,
no esophagus, no stomach, no intestine, no anus. I shall reconstruct the man I am. As a conversation oscillates around the excavated body, Slepian's mind wanders to Thomas Edison and his 1920s work on a valve technology that amplified the vibrations of the departed. Could Audint develop techniques to make audible all the words and whispers ever uttered and scored into the vast sound library of the atmosphere? Could they realise Edison's dream of going beyond recording and instead chase down sounds in the gulfs of outer space? A stare rather than a voice triggers Slepien's re-entry into the present
as he realises that his off-world eyes have betrayed him. Isabel looks unreservedly, but his renewed focus encourages her to continue. She submits that since both phantom limb and Cotard syndrome echo each other's haunting of the body, one in the extension of it, the other in the negation, our senses of being could be formed from outside of consciousness. In response, Slepian proclaims that he considers all sensory information to be spectral in essence. He adds that there are perceptual mechanisms within us that have been deactivated, much like genes that have been trip-switched by extreme experiences. After more speculative conversation,
Slepian is getting that feeling when first discussing the existence of the third ear, an impression that his temporal loaves are being wrapped around his forehead and buttered and fried by the heat of the words fired at his cranium. Realising he's in danger of giving himself away, Slepien impishly pronounces he is peckish. With a disappointed stretch of the lips and arms, Isabel offers him a drink and makes for her small kitchen. Knowing that they must imbibe something bitter if he is to cover his powdery tracks, Slepien hesitantly requests Lucien Gaudin, hoping his pronunciation isn't as bad as his intentions. With a wry smile, Isabel pulls on the handle of a burgeoning mahogany litter cabinet.
Having mixed the cocktail, she quips that hopefully they won't have similar urges of self-destruction to those that caused the demise of the banker their drink is named after. Slepian wonders how she could have any inkling of what he's about to do. She couldn't, he answers himself. With a bell from the kitchen recalling Miss Chimay, Slepien thrusts his hands into his pocket and produces the vial of amobarbital. He has an idea of how much to pour into her drink without causing an overdose but it's easier said than done when one's hands are guided by the shadow puppet of delirium tremens. Slepien digs into the platter of hors d'oeuvres in front of them and drinks rapidly in an attempt to encourage similar behaviour from Isabel.
She unwittingly complies. Deep into a conversation about cross-cultural eating habits, it becomes obvious that she is feeding the kaleidoscope flow of the barbiturate derivative, and so the soft interrogation begins. He asks whether she has Cotard's notebook and why she purchased it. Isabelle's explanation causes Slepien to jolt in his chair. It was reports of information encrypted within his pages that had impelled her to spend a small fortune on the item. Beyond the mere diagnostic, it enabled the reader to seed negation delirium into a patient's bed of cognition and mutate it at will.
From implanting transformations of the body, shrunken throats and displaced hearts, to beliefs of having no stomach or blood, Cotard had learned how to manifest the most extreme forms of the disorder by making people believe that they were the walking dead. Surprised at the extent of her knowledge, Slepien confirms that she has had little success with decryption. This final question before her stupefaction concerns the notebook's whereabouts. Lifting an arm that appears burdened by the gravity of heavy matter, she points towards the room before slumping to the floor. Frustrated that he didn't get an exact location, he opens the door and scans the dark wooded
glass cases and shelves that constitute Isabelle Chimay's library on Delphic panaceas and archaic placebos. After rifling through numerous books, Slepien turns his attention to the locked vitrines And sure enough, there it is. Pride of place with a handwritten label by its side. Impatience getting the better of him, he pulls an Iranian killem onto the case. A lump and wooden radio is unplugged and brought in. He can only hoist it six inches above the vitrine, but the piercing sound of shattered glass is testament to its weight. Relatively unscathed, the notebook is examined by Auden's narcotically aided Lothario.
To his bemusement, it appears that many pages have short musical scores elegantly drawn onto them. Slepion jams down the button on his cannon rangefinder over 120 times. He wants to simply pocket the unnerving journal and run, but if he were caught with it at the airport, there would be problems. Any remorse he might feel over the mess he has made is overridden by the dismay at hearing Isabel's narcotic groans from the adjoining room. It's time to go. Film reels in pocket. Cameron back. Notebook left on the nearest shelf.
he leaves without even so much as a glance at his half-prompt hostess. Back in the hotel, Slepian locks himself in his room, not even daring to leave for dinner before his early morning flight. Every time he hears a siren, a momentary paralysis seizes his body until he perceives it heading the way. other than stewing in a strong sense of regret
of what might have been between himself and Isabel the trip back is uneventful loaded with bottles of french wine and photographs he arrives back in New York appearing to have been a consummate tourist. The next task will be to have the films printed before heading back to Cape May into the debased bunker that currently serves as home. After two months of searching, Orr didn't find their man. A stack of 7x5 photographs have been couriered to Abraham Sinkov, a cryptanalysis on it knew from his ghost army days. He is now chief of the US's first centralized cryptologic unit, the Communications Security Program, which will be later renamed the National Security Agency.
One of Sinkov's favorite pastimes is solving arcane ciphers, codes and cryptograms, hence a package of imageries from 1887 landing in his pigeonhole. At home late on a Saturday night, and Sinkov, glass in one hand, bulge an envelope in the other, plunges into his seat for some relaxation. Spilling whiskey down his neck and photos on his cherry wood table, a tired and somewhat crestfallen smile adorns his face. There will be no waves of exhilaration carrying him off to sleep tonight, for the notated designs constitute musical cryptograms that he should crack before he gets three tumblers into his eight-year-old bottle of Pebbleford, Kentucky, Bourbon.
Much of Sinkov's knowledge of musical languages and cryptograms came from exchanges with the British Cryptoanalytic Service during World War II. He had studied more obvious systems whereby composers such as Haydn, Schumann and Elgar assigned letters to the individual musical notes, but this isn't one of these ciphers. By midnight, he has fathomed out that it is in fact an artificial language called La langue musicale universelle, or Sol Résor. Created by the French composer Jean-Francois Soudre, it had fallen out of use by the late 1880s. Kotar, in a final twist of irony, had chosen a dying musical language through which to
reveal his methods for orchestrating the deceit of the dead and the living. Although able to recognize Solrezol, Sinkov is not fully conversant with it. He puts Felis out into the crypto community, and after three weeks he has hooked young aspiring steganographer Georgina Rochefort, who is obsessed with the crafted science of hidden messages. The 66 mini-schools take the best part of eight days to translate, and by the end of it, she's a little disturbed but happy to be in the good books of a possible future employer. Relieved to have finished the job, Sinkov swiftly returns the decoded rights and procedures to Audint.
Seated around a scarred table in their fortalice, Slepien, Morton and Arnott carefully study Kotar's words from beyond the grave. Abstract in parts due to the languages it has been shuttled through, the principles of engagement and are clear enough that Audit are now confident that they can program the delusion into the sentient. For now though, the instructions are catalogued and archived, and they will not be opened again until Nguyen Van Fong makes it his business to synthesize the ghost with the machine.