falling, falling

(–disgraced Federal agent–)

Dale has long been a believer in the immortality of the soul, if not necessarily its unchanging nature. This much does not surprise him.

Time flows differently inside the Lodge, from moment to moment and from room to room – impermanent and never-staying, mazy corridors and dream clues, the same resin-cast statue in the room he enters as in the room he left, red curtains, the smell of burning hair, stiff armchairs and a woman’s pair of gold earrings. Random blows and insane adventures. A series of strangers. The halls are narrow and the rooms remind him of a church basement crossed with a brothel. There is something yonic about all these easily parted curtains, but Dale is in no frame of mind to appreciate the beauty of the human body. His senses come and go. He is no longer afraid.

Dale is in the Lodge, but not of it. He does not encounter the man in red again.

In one room he finds a man’s severed ear, bluish and moldering. Somewhere an unidentified bird is singing. He believes it may be a robin.

(The nightingale, it flew to me–)

He only sees Laura Palmer once. He supposes that is a good sign.

(–disgraced Federal agent executed–)

He meets BOB in a room with a wheeled wooden table: spotlit and resting sedately on his haunches, long gray hair combed out over his shoulders. Cooper halts as soon as he sees him, and shifts back a little on his heels, but the figure is as inert as a photograph, malignant but frozen in time. Dale studies his face.

(Disgraced Federal agent executed by hanging at Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla. Death row prisoners in the state of Washington are presented with the choice of execution by hanging or by lethal injection. A prisoner in the state of Washington who expresses no other preference for the method of his or her execution is executed by lethal injection. Whatever had been left inside the other Dale, the shadow of Dale, had been incapable of meaningful choice. But that was a long time ago, and Dale had been fending for himself inside a series of red rooms since long before. He does not know how long he can continue.)

He does not know whether he ought to feel responsible for his double’s actions, but he does anyway. Dale has always been of two minds on the existence of capital punishment.

There is light between the red curtains – not brilliant celestial light, but yellow electric household light, about 40 watts and flickering like a moth’s wings. Dale presses through.

**

She’s older now, passing through town for her own purposes. She still smokes her cigarettes and reads her magazines. It’s more than a little like lucid dreaming, drifting like an unmoored weather balloon through the town of Twin Peaks, and that territory is familiar enough that Dale can surrender to it. He is dreaming of Audrey.

As Dale understands it, there is some disagreement among Buddhist traditions regarding the cyclical rebirth of the soul and how swiftly this occurs. The word “soul” with all its divisions – some spirit, or some consciousness, some recurring principle he had been willing to surrender once – is worryingly vague for his present purpose. He’d like to remain himself, as Dale, at least until his duty to this town and its citizens is over and done. The last blue rose case – who killed the real Dale Cooper, and where is he now? He is not sure he will be able to work his own case as selflessly as his responsibilities require. If self-pity ever threatens on the horizon, he will think of Annie Blackburn and Ronette Pulaski.

If there’s any presence to this suburban development, it’s still filmy around the edges from newness. Audrey Horne rents a tidy apartment in the newer part of Twin Peaks. The property has one bedroom, one bathroom, and a landline telephone. There is a voucher from the Great Northern Hotel stuffed into an ashtray.

Dale needs to be quick about this. It’s eleven o’clock at night, but all the lights are on, flooding the place with silty yellow light. Audrey Horne has just finished a harrowing phone call with her supervisor, a Regional Bureau Chief whose name Dale does not recall from life, and is sprawled sideways in a chair at the kitchen table, smoking sullenly. However relieving it is to see Audrey as an adult woman, both beautiful and vivacious, her habits have not changed. Her hair is still dark, shot through prematurely but handsomely with threads of silver, and set in springy waves. There is no ring on her finger.

She is older than Dale Cooper has ever been. She is still Audrey Horne, head to toe.

He concentrates himself without really meaning to, feeling a pang like hunger. The electric lights swell and flicker. Maybe in time they can work out a system derived from Morse code.

Audrey, Dale tries to call out, but it comes out backwards, end over end. Horne looks up sharply, at just the wrong moment; she catches sight of his reflection in the back of the telephone handset and falls out of her chair.

He hadn’t tried hard enough. This isn’t the right place. He’s weaker than ever before. But Audrey Horne is still alive, and that counts for something. He’ll practice patience and try again.

**

Dale is not the only spirit at the old Great Northern Hotel. Josie Packard is there too, and she isn’t happy. Cooper tries reaching out toward her with a psychic tendril, but comes up against a locked door.

He’ll come back to Josie later, with reinforcements; there has to be something he can do to extricate her from her predicament without endangering the woman further. The effort of continual exertion of personality, lest he lose his white-knuckle grip and be drawn back to the place he came from, is both painful and taxing. Mindfulness has begun to itch. There are things Dale’s immaterial spirit can do with relative ease and there are things Dale’s immaterial spirit cannot do at all – he’ll meditate on the significance of these things in the hope of insight but always finds himself longing for nothing more substantial than a good cup of black coffee. Even a bad cup would be pretty good.

Dale has learned things during his time in the Black Lodge. It’s documenting them in any concrete way that will be the trouble. He can’t lift a pencil, or press a key, and he knows better than most that even crucial visions can be maddeningly imprecise. But this is a dream of the Great Northern, realer than real. The colors are more saturated, and the carpeting is thicker than it ever was. He can taste the morning air, because Audrey does, and it tastes like wet bitter pine.

He focuses on the edges of his form, as well as he can remember it – shoes first, and then from there, carving himself back into being through insistent force of thought, flickering and indistinct. It’s a pale imitation. Dale in his own dream wears a black two-button suit and a red necktie.

In her dream, Audrey Horne wears running shorts and sneakers, and a navy blue sweatshirt bearing the letters FBI. The sweatshirt is real, but this version of the Great Northern’s lobby is fake. It’s a film set of a hotel, somehow the same, somehow different.

Audrey is holding a tube of lipstick the color of brick. Her dark hair is raked back in waves. She is not going out for the night, not even in her dream; Dale suspects this is simply a habit, pausing in front of the lobby mirror where no mirror has hung for a long time. Everything else is indistinct.

She applies her lipstick in distinct, careful swipes, and when she raises her head Dale is there in the mirror behind her. He doesn’t mean to be there; he simply is. Now is the time for sayings like don’t be afraid, or this is important, Audrey, when you wake up I’d like you to find a pencil and a pad of paper, but Dale finds it difficult to speak. His throat will not comply, because his throat no longer exists, but the idea of his throat seems to be lined with cotton batting –

The look on her face is equal parts surprise and stiff mistrust. There are lines on her face, which Dale feels to be good.

“Hello, Audrey. I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I have something to tell you.” This time around the words force themselves out in the appropriate order. Navigating a maze of red curtains had taken every ounce of conscious willpower – like running in a dream, where only effort could prevail before running became swimming, or aimless bounding uninhibited by gravity. Even now he feels as if he could come untethered at any moment – a balloon on a string, and somebody else holds the scissors to snip the tether and let him float away to wander. It’s difficult to be patient with himself, under the circumstances.

Dale tries to smile, with the same force of effort with which he tries to speak, and it must work because the apprehension melts from her face. This is not Audrey’s first time seeing a ghost.

“Hiya, Coop. You’re dead.”

Dale tries to martial himself into more of a presence, and less of a full-body apparition. It’s only slightly less taxing. Speaking feels like shouting underwater – how Gordon Cole must feel, or have felt. Perhaps they do things differently now. “I read your article on chemical ballistics analysis.” He hopes he hadn’t overstepped in doing this, but the proof sheets were spread out on the table in her suite, and there wasn’t much to do around the place, if she’d forgive him saying so. “You’ve done fine work.”

She has done fine work. She’s a special agent herself now. She’d met his doppelganger face to face and lived.

“I knew it wasn’t you, Agent Cooper.” She shuts her eyes and shucks back her sweatshirt to touch the scar on the side of her neck. Her throat is white and the scar is still mottled red, like a zigzag, or a lowercase letter. Ever since the hospital fire, when Audrey Horne is in the throes of strong emotion, she puts her hand over that scar. In front of company, it is a sinuous and affected movement, tipping her head and clasping with a manicured hand over the lapel of a suit jacket. When she is alone it’s a compulsive action. The scar is old, and Audrey is older too. It’s important to notice these things. Dale doesn’t know how he knows them. “Is that a strange thing for me to say? It looked like you, but it wasn’t. Thought I was cracking up. What do you need me to do?”

Dale Cooper’s shadowy twin had been executed after seven years and sixteen days in custody, four escape attempts, and a double murder committed in the furtherance of first-degree rape and felony arson. Dale does not miss his body at all, and cannot remember how it felt to inhabit it. But the knowledge that his own body, or a very effective representation of it, was used to commit these crimes is shameful to him. But BOB isn’t dead; not by a long shot. Some other person is in the same boat, right now.

(BOB is out, and ready for fun–)

“I’m afraid you’re right. Listen, Audrey. Laura’s no longer in danger, but other people may be. We’re not out of the woods yet. I need you to contact Sheriff Truman.”

Dale tries to think of how many years have passed and makes himself so dizzy he nearly dematerializes completely. But Audrey’s eyes are still locked on him.

Her sharp eyebrows have furrowed slightly. “You were on to something when it got you, weren’t you? It was Earle.”

“Yes and no. I saw Laura in the Black Lodge, but she’s not there any more.”

“Are you?”

Dale can feel himself slipping and scattering. His mind is going, which unsettles him. He can feel it happen. “No.”

“Will you stay? Can you?”

“I’ll try.”

**

It’s quiet in town, for a Friday morning. People are driving different cars, and the storefronts are different. There are fewer television antennas. The town itself is thinner and paler, crumbling into aborted developments and real estate signage. There are other places in the world than Twin Peaks. He could go anywhere, maybe, spooled out far enough on whatever astral threads anchor him here – anywhere at all, to Ghostwood Forest and Tibet and beyond. Night wandering.

The next morning, the blinds are drawn, and on the table in Audrey Horne’s FBI-funded hideout sits a paper cup of coffee and a paper box containing two slices of cherry pie. There is also a woman’s vanity mirror. Audrey is shouldering out of her coat. She raises her voice, aiming it in no particular direction, Dale supposes:

“I called Truman. He’s not the sheriff any more, but he hasn’t forgotten you, Coop. He’s on his way over.”

“I’m sorry about this, Audrey.” It’s easier now and less taxing to group the syllables into order, but the soles of Dale’s shoes are tracking dark footprints on the carpeted floor. Oil, or maybe blood. Time is running out.

“Should I light some candles? Dust off the old Ouija board? This isn’t my first rodeo. I tried to tell Deputy Brennan about you. I don’t know why I tried,” Audrey says, starting to laugh in a hard kind of way that presages nothing good, “but I tried. I ran into him at the grocery store. I mean, talk about jurisdictional conflict. I even kept in touch with Denise Bryson, hoping some day she’d have a lead on what happened to you. Why now, Agent Cooper?”

The word haunt strikes Dale as more agreeable than whatever he’d been doing in the Black Lodge. That isn’t entirely fair – meditating, or sifting, or looking inward. Tracing a spiritual path that doubles back on itself. But primarily, waiting. Haunting is more sociable. It’s time to turn outward now.

“Laura Palmer told me she’d see me again in twenty-five years. We may not have much time. I’m taking advantage of my momentary mobility to pass on what I know. Are you prepared to take a couple notes?”

Special Agent Horne settles in, cross-legged, at the end of the coffee table. From underneath the table she produces a yellow pad of paper and a ballpoint pen with an eraser topper shaped like a doughnut. From the pocket of her blue jeans she produces another device. The sleek black rectangle Audrey produces from her pocket is not a dictaphone. Its mechanism is manipulated by taps and swipes, but the red circle on its face is lit up, and the tape is clearly rolling.

“I’ll repeat after you. Let’s get started.”