Tink
Weill Cornell Medical Center 525 East 68th Street
The doctors in Critical Care/Resus are happy with me so I am wheeled to a recovery bay. I manage to persuade the angelic ER nurse with the deep south voice and the almond eyes to get my journal from my locker. There is an Atlantic scale jet lag between her speaking and my understanding what she said, and she nearly takes the notebook away from me. I manage both a smile and the lie that I was lost in her eyes. They are worth getting lost in, but shining a light through the fog that fills my empty skull is the only thing I have energy for right now. With a shaky pen I take it one slow sentence at a time.
I have more questions than answers.
Note on the Van Astor event
It is a mistake to think of a possession as something that “enters” a person.
Jung would say what I experienced was the seizing of the ego by an autonomous complex. He insisted that these fragments often mask themselves as archetypal entities: gods, demons, shadows. When the ego is exhausted (or meddling where it shouldn’t), the person behaves as though under the influence of another.
Q. Does this apply to Tink’s subjugation under Inanna/Astaroth at the Astors’s bizarre killing?
Q. Can one archetype dominate and in some sense assimilate another?
This seems more plausible when the archetype has sharded sub-forms.
Pauli believed the psyche can, under extreme conditions, ripple outward and collapse potentials in the outer world. This, he argued, was no different from what a quantum observer does. A haunting, then, is not metaphorical but a psycho-physical event.
That may be the how, but it is not the why!
The focus of the anger I experienced was centred on the Van Astors and this places the cause of the event squarely on their shoulders.
Q. But what is their relationship with Tink and Inanna?
Q. Why were these particular archetypes the manifestation of the Van Astors crisis?
What if something real emerges when belief is strong enough, trauma deep enough, and symbol old enough?
That is when the walls groan. That is when glass bends without breaking. That is when you smell sulphur and char. That is when you stop calling it metaphor.
When this happens, I don’t perform an exorcism. That would be to reinforce the form—to instantiate the very entity I would deny. Instead, I shift the pattern. I return to the root image—the clean myth before the corruption. This is not theology. It is ontological engineering.
Bill arrives with a cup of coffee so hot it bites and he juggles the paper cup from hand to hand. He looms by my bed, which he is really good at, and interrupts my writing.
‘Barty, your heart stopped.’
‘I know Bill, but you were close by.’
‘Barty, put your damn pen down. We need to talk.’
I close my notebook and put my pen and journal on the table beside my bed. ER at Weil Cornell is typically hospital bleak, with pale green walls and machines that beep at you while tracing your probability of life in jagged green lines. Bill had called in a 10-13, ‘officer needs help’ and started CPR on me when he found me on the floor of the Van Astor’s apartment. This is why my chest is bruised and it hurts to breathe. I have a dream of drifting across the reception to Central Park Tower and blue lights surging in waves over all that immaculate marble.Then nothing. Then the rattle of a chrome barred bed in a small white room that rocks as it moved. I came round fully in ER with the bleating of machines and the groans of the undead.
‘Get me home Bill, before psych eval get here, or I am never getting out.’
‘Dammit, Barty.’ Bill did a strange little dance waving his arms and turning to and fro, his face a mask.
‘Will you stop joking about this for one damn minute,’ he barks and he looks anguished. Not just angry, although that’s justified, but desperate as well. We have been through a lot together, Bill and I.
‘It’s my coping mechanism.’
‘Well I don’t have one left you bastard, you used it all up. It killed you Barty, or at least it tried to.’
The barracks room chat goes Bill got assigned to DI because he was not fit enough or bright enough to hack it on real cases. This rumour is spread by imbeciles to protect themselves from admitting they didn’t have the guts to face what Bill has faced. But it’s true Bill is still a conventional thinker despite his exposure to the liminal territory between this shared hallucination we call reality, and the infinite.
‘It didn’t try to kill me, Bill. It was caught up in its own grief and anger.’
‘It stopped your heart, Barty.’
‘No, I did that.’
That brought Bill to a halt.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
“I lost control. For just the briefest moment. I realised that what killed the Van Astor’s was their fear of the archetype’s anger. I imagined their fear, and that’s all it takes to materialise an event when the potential is too high.’
‘You mean it scared you to death.’
‘Kinda, yes.”
‘Well damn me you do have emotions.’
‘What I had was a loss of control, Bill.’
‘Call it what you like Magi, but that was a damn fool risk. What if I hadn’t come back to see if you were OK?’
‘I don’t do counterfactuals, Bill. Look, I took a risk, yes, but it worked. I now know who we are dealing with.’
‘Was it worth your life though Barty? That’s twice in 24 hours you nearly died.’
‘I’m getting good at it.’
‘Barty!’
Bill manages to circumvent an involuntary 72 hour hold by roping Stella in as my personal psychotherapist, which she is going to love, and I get out by late pm. It’s a heavy day outside, dark grey clouds pregnant with snow drifting over the city streets. The air chill in only the way a New York winter can chill you. There are days in winter when the city impersonates an industrial freezer. This is one of those bone brittle days. That’s an unfortunate metaphor. It causes a flash back to poor little Madeleine Delacroix’s thighbone sticking out of her roasted thigh.
I wait in the compulsory wheelchair while Bill goes and gets his car. Then he helps me into the passenger seat and we head towards the Village in the dense traffic, all the car lights on early in the gloom. Christmas in the shops and streets creating gulches of hope and joy and memory at the bottom of dark cliffs. Symbols of love and peace stolen from the pagans and blessed by the church. Fir trees decorated with symbols of hope for the spring, Saturnalian wreaths heralding the suns return, Celtic fertility is assured by the holly and the Ivy, the light of the sun in winter, Saturnalian wax tapers, becoming Lumen Christi candles. Christmas is a riot of stolen archetypes.
I tell Bill I have more thinking to do and he says ’bout time you did’. I am not going to reflect on my two near death experiences, despite what Bill might want, I have some serious thinking to do.
Inanna wasn’t the first female deity. There are icons of female worship as early as 40,000 BCE like The Venus of Willendorf. Her voluptuous shape expressing everything that had to be fought for in prehistory, plenty and satiation and comfort and fecundity. Treasures denied in our ancestors hard lives and therefore longed for and so made archetypes of desire.
Inanna inherited all this raw longing which, if Jung is to believed, became part of the universal unconscious that we all share. You can dismiss this as yet more Jungian Ju Ju - but Jung didn’t believe in mystical psychic energy either. He believed there was a biological basis for these universal archetypes. They were hard-wired into our neurology by evolution, like our facility for language and abstract thought.
There was something about the Van Astor’s that disturbed the ancient Ananna archetype. The hatred manifesting from the archetype was savage, overwhelming. So I need to know more about the Van Astors. And I need to know who called in Tink’s manifestation in Lenny’s bar earlier that night. They seem unconnected but I don’t believe in coincidence.
Then there is Tink’s role in this. The shard of Inanna that still lives on today, although in a barely recognisable form. Tink was still part of the original goddess archetype, but distorted and less powerful and therefore far more fragile. Her ability to survive as a viable Elemental may now be at risk.
‘What the hell!’
I look up. Bill has turned into Grove street and there are two additional squad cars in the street with lights flashing and a group of cops at my door. Bill accelerates hard and then breaks just as hard, the Cadillac slewing on the slush filled street.
‘You stay here. You’re in no condition.’
Bill runs up my icy step and barrels into the group at the door, handling the uniformed police as if they were rioters. There are yells of complaint and one officer slips on the icy step and falls hard. His partner reaches for his sidearm and then re-holsters swiftly as Bill butts his shield on the officers nose. I get out of the car to help Bill but it takes far too long and my breath comes in small sips. I get glass sharp jabs of pain through my chest for the attempt.
‘What’s going on here!’ Bill demands, his face flushed and jaw thrust out.
‘We got orders to arrest the freak, sir.’
‘Well I am giving you new ones get the hell away from this door. Now!’
“My orders come from the Lieutenant.’
“I am the DI officer in charge. You know what DI protocol is officer?’
‘Uh, yessir…’
‘You think the Lieutenant can handle a DI?’
There is a renewed shuffling on the steps as the patrol officers look at one another and carefully avoid looking at Bill. They are waiting for one of their group to break ranks so Bill helps them by pushing one officer until he steps down. One by one the rest follow onto the sidewalk.
Bill studies them from the top step and says,
‘You were following the Lieutenant’s orders, and that’s the problem. The Lieutenant has no experience of DI cases which are my call, not his. I’m issuing an order as the DI specialist in charge. You won’t take the heat for this, it’s my responsibility.’
‘Father. Can I help you in any way?’
Until then I had not noticed that one of the crowd still on the steps is wearing a solid collar. The priest is an older man. Latino, tall, thin and with his grey hair short and slicked back. There is something martial about his bearing. A reserve. A firm and considered control. I hadn’t seen him before but he had the self assurance and focused personality required to be an exorcist. The Mayor still wants to try exorcism?
‘You may be exceeding your authority detective’ I hear the priest say. Not a New York accent.
‘You leave me to worry about that father. As you are a civilian and this is a police matter you need to leave. I’ll ask one of patrols to see you home.’
‘I have been sent by the Bishop, detective.’
‘Well that’s nice of him to help out and I’ll be sure to leave him a big tip in the salver on Sunday, but you are out of here.’
The priest stiffens.
‘You cannot just dismiss me like this. You don’t know what you are dealing with!’
‘Yeah I get it. My soul is in danger yada yada yada. Now take it one step at a time it’s kinda slippery with all the snow and I don’t want you to end up on your butt. That might damage the dignity of the church .’
‘Detective I object to your attitude and demeanour…’
‘Well that cuts both ways father. Did you bother to read the preliminary report from the DI psychiatrist?’
‘I did not know there was one.’
‘How good will the Diocese of New York look trying to exorcise a young woman with diminished responsibilities, father? At Christmas for gods sake. It’s the sort of story that will stick around a while.’
The priest’s face tries on a number of shapes, none of them Christian, and then turns from Bill and stomps away. I am sure he wanted to make that look more authoritative but the ice turns it into a charade.
Bill waits on the top step until the priest gets into a squad car. It takes a few more minutes but then the blues on the patrol cars turn off and the two cars pull away down the street.
Bill spends some angry time with the two officers left on station and then walks up to me.
‘We got trouble, Barty.’
‘I know, Bill. But I have got to rest up for a bit. And I have to help Tink.’
‘Will you be safe. Barty?’
I told Bill I would be safe and he helps me up the steps to my house. I turn to Bill.
‘I’ll go in by myself Bill. She will be scared.’
Bill frowns and takes a deep breath. It leaves him with a heavy sigh and a cloud of vapour. He shrugs and turns back and steps down to the white and black of the street.
‘I’ll talk to you in the morning, Barty. If you are still breathing.’
Tink’s fear is in the gleam of glass lit from the street, the swing of the shadow on the hall ceiling as I close the front door on the dark afternoon light, the crescents and lines of the mouldings rushing away in a sweep of darkness. The door’s closure echoes and the fall of my feet on the floor drives the staccato beat of her heart faster.
You can feel it in the air tensile and yet oily with charge. You can see her fear twisting the light. There is a distinctive smell, cinnamon and sulphur and the ash of an old fire and something else burning, something that was once sweet and now catches the back of my throat. I wonder how far she has regressed, how far from her normal form she has been driven. I wonder for a moment if the priest had tried anything, a preliminary command, but I think not, this fear doesn’t feel defiant.
‘Tink. It’s Barty. No one else is coming in. I sent them all away.’
I take off my coat, which sets the broken glass in my chest to prick new lines on my ribs, and drop the heavy coat on the floor. I can only shuffle like an old man, Bill’s anxiety is marked out in bruises on my chest for which I am grateful but it still hurts when I walk.
Before I sit down in my chair at my stone cold grate I run my hand along the bookshelf and find the volume I want. It’s a very old book, the second pressing issued by Charles Shribner’s Sons and printed at the Plimpton Press. I settle in my chair and twist the book until I can read in the light from the street. I clear my throat and start.
‘All children, except one, grow up.’
I have read through to page eleven when Tink says, ‘But I can feel more than one thing at a time.’
She is in the dark corner of the room as far away from the door as she can get. I can only see her by the light reflected in her eyes. My mind fills in the rest and then I can see more, her cowed stance, one hand at her mouth.
‘I know Tink. You are far more than Mr Barrie’s creation, you always have been.’
‘And I can be good all the time if I want to be.’
‘But you find that boring.’
There is just the flicker of a smile.
‘Come and sit by me Tink.’
She hesitates, and then asks,
‘Can I sit in your lap?’
“Yes Tink.’