A Condensed History of North East I - 3rd Part : A

Part III: North’s Revolution

He was born in France between December 1884 and January 1885 exactly at the split-second tick before the first chime of the clock set off at midnight’s strike. He was named North East by his father Middle because the poor man thought it would bring good fortune if the name pertained to the positive-positive quadrant of the Cartesian plane.

This was three decades before the time of North’s War, the period when North East I would Split and bring into existence Maiv Norte and Evan Timor: Norte meaning North; and Timor being a cross between the word East and the name of the Roman mythological personification of horror. To those gifted with selective dyslexia, both full names can be read as normative.

As history is constantly subject to reinterpretations, constant unlearning is always advisable. However, the written series of occurrences that proceeded from Heading East to South East are final and firmly bound to their timeline and the respective events involved (research on the reader’s part is encouraged). It is due to an entirely different reason that the reader is advised to forget everything he or she had learned and is about to learn about the Easts, particularly North.



During the three years that followed his son’s birth, Middle had undergone the most terrible chain of misfortunes of his willed life. And as all that had happened during these years were consequent to his willful choices and conscious actions, it was not hard to pin on him any blame that emerged and had ruined his life. Fortuna had a hand, of course, but his Virtu was reckless:



The first problem with him was that he could never stick to his jobs. He hopped from one line of work to another (even up to four at a time) with false hope that the next ones would be better-paying. Nobody can be held at fault for this, not even an unschooled nobody like him, he thought. And that was true, but only to a certain point: Reason.

An offshoot of a legacy of traveling men, hence a master of languages, he once had a desk job, albeit in an indecent periodical, as a ghost writer. But the office was shut down shortly by the government and he was incriminated in libel cases. In the courtroom, he proved that a drunken man can speak articulately for he so fluently cursed everyone present in every language he knew, except in French. Unfortunately, the judge present there was half-German and Middle was betrayed by alliteration of scheide and schwuchtl and was charged with contempt. Even though he got pardoned immediately, he never landed another office job.

This caused him to be more passionate with his vices, especially cheap cigars. In effect, he and his common law wife Maria suffered from mild tuberculosis, and so, they decided it best to refrain from breastfeeding their son.

Middle managed to get another two jobs: Everyday at very early morning as a milk-delivery man, and from high noon to late night as a cab driver. He was fired from both.

First, he was caught stealing pints of milk for baby North. The booting increased his alcoholism which thus affected his driving. But it was not the rashness on the road that cost him the job. It was him getting caught tranquilizing horses and then using them as punching bags.

Middle hated horses. He also hated other beasts-of-travel like camels, elephant, and mules, but he hated horses the most. In his defense for that time when he was caught in the act by a stable-keeper, he said that horses were instrumental to the British when those white men scared and massacred a native-American tribe. But of course, right then, that was just the alcohol and bitterness talking.

He expelled his angst working as a butcher. The salary was below average but he was contented chopping meats, and so that occupation was where he stayed the longest. Middle could never go wrong with slicing flesh and using cleavers, meat-hooks, and other sharp, pointed objects.



One night in mid-1886, a skinny woman of sixty knocked on their apartment door asking to be hidden from a murderous son-in-law. She explained that her daughter’s husband was trying to kill her for her wealth, and she’d rather reward it to them if they’d let her in and keep her alive. It was no contest for the couple. The old lady clearly could use a good amount of goodwill as they could use a good amount of notes. They accepted her in, and that was when the police came and the shoot-out started.

After a short festival of flying bullets doubled with an orchestra of shots and ricochets, the old lady fell bloody dead beside the cradle, with her bony forefinger latched to her trigger. There were no casualties on the law’s side, but the infant North was caught in the crossfire with a bullet lodged right above the left knee. It would not have mattered heavily since there were only skin and muscle damage, but for a baby, the leg is only mere inches away from the heart or the head. And the blood loss—not to mention the chance of sepsis—to a child of that age, is highly fatal.

The police took care of all the medical bills and made sure that North would get out of the hospital perfectly healthy and that there would be no lasting damage save for a scar. But even though the police shouldered all expenses and he was handed some cash for the damages, Middle wanted further payback from the other party.

It was explained to him by a rookie detective named Ganimard that the old woman was known as Lucienne d’Corsican (not her real name), a courier of counterfeit banknotes and unregistered arms for a local syndicate that had made some news throughout France. This gang was not like the ‘Ndrangheta or Camorra organizations Middle encountered in Italy: This was a band of burglars, pirates, hustlers, and hired guns. This was a classless group, except for a boss and a second in command; and they really got no class compared to the Italian crime families. Within a week, Middle tracked this group down. And then he joined them.

In a span of seven months upon joining this syndicate who called themselves L’Equipe de Renards, Middles financial condition significantly rose up. That was not his main goal, though. He was secretly working for Ganimard to collect enough incriminating evidence to get a heavy sentence for each member. That was not his main goal either. Ganimard believed that Middle was doing this to take personal revenge for North’s accident. That was not the point, too.

As a Renard, Middle’s knowledge on the usage of guns, knives, explosives, drugs, and government corruption extensively improved. Before he was one year in L’Equipe, he stole and hid a whole chestful of money with a side of handguns, ammunitions, and bookie ledgers. In short, he misappropriated a huge fraction of the gang’s accumulated holdings from the previous fiscal year. Now, to him, that is what you call a main goal.

Middle got by well above suspicion for the theft of the group’s assets. Another member was suspected and sacked for his crime. Unfortunately, his association with Ganimard was discovered in February 1887 with the help of a corrupt official named Daubreq. The syndicate bound, gagged, and carried Middle south to a secluded area in the French Riviera. There they treated him to hours of sincere beating with utmost cruelty. When the thrill of tedious sadism got old, the head Renard, just for fun, injected Middle with a drug meant only for horses. Then they buried him alive and left him for dead.



At least two thousand people died at the cost of his survival. By an ironic sort of twisted deus ex machina, a great earthquake ravaged the Riviera and its population less than an hour after Middle was left underground. The terrible terrain tremors uprooted several trees around his premature grave, and that luckily managed to dig his head up. A rescue party soon found him barely, barely alive.

He had not regained half his health when Middle took his family away. They moved northwest again: They crossed mainland France to Normandy and the English Channel until they reached the East End of London.



Sensorimotor to Preoperational
Had Middle not brought them to England, North’s Revolution would not have happened. This revolution was in no means a form of armed revolt or a demonstrated class struggle, but an uprising that stirred inside North’s head. All the same, it was the leading breakthroughs and popular ideologies in the Victorian and Edwardian times that brought it forth. Also, this revolution was the direct antecedent of North’s War, most popularly known as the Great War of Europe, which was then misjudged and misnamed as The War to End All Wars.



North East I grew up without a mother and a father. He was only three years old when his mother Maria was murdered and his father Middle turned catatonic. He was raised by a French wet nurse named Victoire and a mysterious handsome woman whom he addressed as Aunt Irene. The wealth that middle accumulated legally in France had managed to be enough support for North only until he was five. From then until his mid-teens, he lived through the generosity of the Holmes brothers.

From 1888 to 1896, he had been cared for by the most influential people in Western Europe. These were the people who walked the same path as the Easts that came before their time: They molded the socio-cultural and political panorama around them and by their own means—intentionally or not—turned history to the angle they deemed best, but they stayed out of the A List as far as history professors are concerned. At best they were considered fictional, and if they’re consciousness still lingers in this physical world even though their body had surrendered long ago to mother Universe, they would surely be happy with their status as it is.

North East I was tutored by Aunt Irene about the basic rules of power, or roughly, manipulation and blackmail. She also taught him the art of secrecy and the practice of being discreet regarding one's affairs, plans, and real opinions. Being only five years old then, North had already managed to keep his relationship to Aunt Irene undetected by anyone, even by Nurse Victoire, even by Sherlock Holmes.

During the same years, Sherlock trained young North in the field of detection and deduction. From the great famous detective, North mastered the skill of saber-sharp observation and the sacred rule of detachment and impartiality. Sherlock Holmes also trained him the physical arts of boxing, fencing, and jiu-jitsu.

Through Mycroft Holmes, on the other hand, North gained extensive knowledge regarding politics, international relations, social structures, mathematics, semantics, sociology, and a little anthropology. Basically, he learned through Mycroft how to understand the collective psyche of different sets of people, and of individuals from/in different places and/or scenarios.

It was his mother-figure Victoire who taught him about decorum, politeness, respect, tolerance, and religion. She also trained him in first-aid and basic medicine regarding the handy chemicals, drugs, and paraphernalia, and their applications and effects.

By the time North was twelve, it had seemed that he had gained all the precursory knowledge and traits that would make him bring forth the greatest and most drastic works in the history of the 20th Century CE. But actually: Not quite yet.



When he was only seven years old, North East I joined the Baker Street Irregulars: Sherlock’s pack of young street-urchin informers and errand-runners. He proved to be an invaluable asset in every mission. During this immersion into the life on the gray streets, he began to be specially self-aware and critical. It was also at this stage that he secretly (except with the Holmes brothers) discovered the awesome effects of morphine and cocaine. Both substances were not considered illegal then—and were easily accessible in Sherlock Holmes’ room—although nobody had an idea what they could do to a seven-year old frame.

One midnight, when he was sleeping right after finishing the novel starring Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was roused violently by a tremendous and bitter pang that seemed to resound from his very core to every pore on his body. It was as if each of the smallest particles that made up his body were being torn—if it felt like they were being sliced, that would have been less painful—by a drunken brute that had been drained of a lot of strength but not of persistence. North could not tell how long the pain lasted. It could have been forever for it really felt like it was. It must have been only for a few seconds for if it was any longer, North was sure he would have been killed. But it did not matter when it was over. The important thing for him was that he survived until it was over and totally gone. It just stopped and left no residue of even a slight physical discomfort.

Right after that, North realized that he had torn his pajamas. He was naked, and in that bedroom in which he should have been alone, he saw another naked kid, and this kid was holding some things and was saying something hard to understand. Blood rushed either to or from his head. He fainted at the sight of the other boy, as this character looked and sounded exactly like him.



Continued on Part 3: North’s Revolution - Segment B
Previous: Heading East to South East

Copyright 2008 Klaro de Asis