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

Part III: North’s Revolution - Segment B

All North could remember when he woke up the following morning was the other character was talking and handing him some things: A stub of red candle, some sheets of paper, a pen, and an envelope. Because of the shock of the previous night and the lethargy of his state as he was trying to recall the incident, he found it almost impossible to make any sense of the second North’s monologue.

Suspecting that one of his irregular peers had played a prank on him, he inspected the candle and compared with his own fingerprints the markings on the wax surface. Based on that, the findings affirmed that the apparition was not a prank but definitely baffling, as the prints on the candle—which he swore he had never touched before, and held only with a cardboard tong during the check—were all his. But just to be sure, being the hard-headed cynic scientific-thinker that he was, he weaved a fictional yet more believable scenario to talk Sherlock Holmes into collecting and producing a database of fingerprints.

Contrary to popular belief, Sherlock Holmes was not a cold heartless problem-solving machine as one queer French monk describes him to be. In actuality, North needed only to say once that a fingerprint system might provide the only lead to solve Maria’s murder, and all those killings that trailed close. It was not just because of the good probability of effectiveness that Holmes agreed to the boy, it was because of his compassion to his fellowmen, especially to North whom he treated like his own son. Having said that, it can also be inferred that Sherlock Holmes’ heir (and it is correct to say, his upgraded version) The Bat Man loves to laugh.

Months later, Holmes himself convinced the British authorities that a fingerprint system would be handy for forensics as it had been for the Chinese and Persians centuries ago, and he himself had researched. By 1895, a fingerprint classification system and the first Fingerprint Bureau was created in British India, and its success led to the foundation of like agencies in the UK and in New York. Sadly, in spite of all its finger-pointing efficiency, the system became of no use to North.



With the help of Dr. John Watson and his exercises and prescription medicines, North gradually gave up his prepubescent dependence on drugs. When he was twelve, he got over his obsession in finding the alleged doppelganger, putting that night’s episode’s credit to the cocaine. He would not have succeeded, though, if he had not suffered some months of brain-fever, which was what really disabled him from acquiring and consuming addictive injectibles and inhalables. It was only when he recovered from the illness that the withdrawal appeared to take its toll. North became withdrawn from human interaction. He spent most of 1897 and a little of 1898 in solitude, self-imprisoned in the study of Mycroft Holmes, and nosing through political books, classified papers, and confidential ledgers.

At this point, it is necessary to acquaint the readers to the character of Mycroft. As his seven-year younger brother Sherlock would put it; Mycroft Holmes had again and again provided elucidations to perplexing cases, which constantly proved to be correct in the end. But Mycroft lacks physical energy, and would rather be regarded wrong rather than to exert effort to prove that he is right. As for his profession, it can be summed up simply as the most indispensable position in the British Government. Sherlock might have even said once that Mycroft was sometimes the British Government. Everything goes through him. Indeed, Mycroft had an extraordinary faculty for figures and peculiar details that even Sherlock could overlook. He also displayed signs of misanthropy, and thus, was not keen to having company. This trait was the obvious reason for him co-founding the Diogenes Club, a society for loners who only love to sit and read. A number of scholars have speculated that the club served as a front for the British Secret service, and they have proofs and stories to back up their theories on this.

During those times, Mycroft could not care less about North rummaging his classified papers. None of the contents would make sense to a twelve-year old, anyway, and he was right. All the sensitive information there were only as good to North as an inside joke he heard delivered in a circle he was outside of. Realizing his boredom and the feeling of being outcast, North put his attention to published books. Nevertheless, this shifting of interest never meant to say that he had forgotten anything he had already mentally ingested, with or without sense.

Nurse Victoire, having long before given up talking North into going to normal school, couldn’t have been more content in seeing the young man buried in various readings. That way at least, she thought, his mind wouldn’t atrophy academically. Still, she was troubled that he might not be able to find a regular and decent job because of lack of official merits. She feared that North might end up like his father, or worse, like her former son-figure Arsene. She never realized that her fear was really an educated premonition.

To help North East I outgrow his acute aversion to other people (staying with Mycroft was the last thing the kid needs, she expressed openly), Victoire took him along to her work in the clinics and hospitals across the East End. At first, he abhorred the display of fondness of Victoire’s peers, but in a span of weeks, he learned to appreciate them and enjoy their attention. It was easy for him to acknowledge the value of the nurses’ work, and it was no wonder that he promised himself to be one day one of them, or maybe, unlike his father, he can be a doctor.

Say by day, North became more and more interested in medical practice. It came to a point where Victoire had to make ways so North would not come with her to work anymore, as he was becoming obtrusive to the staff. North was reasonable and sensitive enough to understand the troubles he was causing, and he eventually came back to the quiet anaerobic company of books and periodicals.

This chapter of his life opened his eyes to the world, from scientific breakthroughs to international relations. Of all the topics he read about, he was most interested in the developments that followed the publication of The Origin of Species and A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism; the invention of the telephone, the opening of Suez Canal, Japan’s dawn of rapid modernization, the massive expansion of the United States; the end of British East India Company, the Long Depression in Western Europe, the Franco-Prussian War, Jack the Ripper’s murders, the famines in Finland, Persia, and China; the end of Russian-Circassian War and of the American-Indian Wars, the freedom of the Balkans, the Philippine Revolution, and the revival of the Olympic Games in Athens. These and a lot more were all imprinted in North’s mind, leaving a lasting impression about the path the world was taking.

Although North acquired Sherlock’s disinterest in Philosophy, he busied himself with the thought-provoking ideologies that were very active in his time, just for the sake of gathering knowledge about their subjects. It wasn’t because he was indifferent in these schools of thought—in point if fact, North had many intriguing socio-political and existential queries lingering in his head—he just found them all unsatisfactory. For him, philosophies always work two opposing ways, with their answers most of the time leading to questioning itself, are entirely corruptible, and are apparently useless when applied to general practical applications like, say, man’s life driven by his natural attitude. In North’s view, the end always lies in individuals molesting even the purest of ideas and the most noble of reasons to feed his own glory and appetites; and that on the other hand, nobody’s life would actually stop just because of the absence of ideological guidelines.

As his forefather Heading East was interested in religion only for its social implications, North saw that the probable effects of different ideologies only operate when fed or sold to collective minds, i.e. to a group of people organized by a common way of viewing a system or structure. To an individual, the most genius and infallible principles (if there was one) amounts to nothing, even when that individual lives tightly by it. But when many think as one and they act to represent one, then that is when change pushes through. Of course, the most foolish of nincompoops know this. And so it was not this realization that would make North a catalyst in our known history, but the madness it triggered in him. Having his own theories and postulates about the guiding laws of life created in him a mild megalomania or hubris, and this would drive him to making corrupted calculations and actions until the years that would see his end as North East I.



To illustrate his behavior regarding his personal philosophies, presented below are some incidents that occurred from 1899 to 1901.

He deliberately ended his more than one year hiatus from drugs, proclaiming to himself that nobody knows better about him than him, so nobody can tell him what to inhale or inject. He was currently in his early teens, and his hormones could not have been any happier with that attitude. Well, those hormones were partly responsible for his decision to welcome back the vices, anyway. He was a teenage rebel who essentially had a cause: Cocaine-driven and morphine-fueled plans to systematically sensationally change the world.

He started by criticizing not society but the other people who were already criticizing society and propagating their own teachings. There was too much anger and lies, he thought. His first onset was against the New Thought Movement. Although he roughly accepted their belief that all sickness originates in the mind, he judged all their metaphysical teachings as delusions. Even as he agreed with occultist Aleister Crowley that a great cause of failure in life is ignorance of one’s true will, he shunned Crowley’s notion of True Will as mystically influenced by the Universe. He even commented on why they capitalize the T and W.

Just to demonstrate his point, North traveled to Crowley’s home to befriend him, charm him, seduce him. The young man led the famous occultist on in every way one may imagine until they get to the point where they were all alone in a bedroom and Crowley was already totally naked, fully and painfully erect, and very ready to enter the tight puckered realms of fantasy. Suddenly, North turned him down on the spot, mockingly claiming that it was not the True Will of either of them, and that the Universe is the one to blame if, in a short while, somebody’s lower stomach started to hurt. He left Aleister Crowley with a false consolatory remark: “Sorry, it’s not you, it’s the Universe.” He went away disturbingly pleased with himself, trying hard to suppress a sweet satanic smirk. Flirting, petting, and what-else with another man was a confirmation that he will not let himself be stopped by anything. This reaffirmation gave him a much better high than a fine blend of opium and cocaine chased by absinthe and morphine.

One afternoon, he was halfway through a folder of articles (some were not from publications, as this was borrowed from Mycroft) about Max Planck and Albert Einstein and their works, when he suddenly dropped his readings. When Victoire came home that evening, she saw North staring blankly and motionless at a Van Gogh reproduction on the wall. She did not mind him at first, for this was nothing beyond normal for him. When she called him for dinner and she saw that he was still in the same static position even as a large spider was crawling around his neck, she thought that that was what’s wrong. She rolled a paper, walked towards North, told him not to move and realized it was a waste of words, duh! (or whatever expression they used), and assured him it’s not going to harm him. She chucked away the crawler with one precise swing, taking care not to hit North’s nape, lest the spider’s spiky hair dig through his skin. The critter was thrown to the floor but it never suffered the fall’s impact, because at the very moment it hit the ground, its eight eyes saw the growing shadow of Victoire’s foot, and that was the last thing it saw. But still, North was not moving, he was not even blinking. She called, and he did not answer. She shook him, but he did not respond. So the spider was not the problem, and Victoire would have thought about whether she should feel guilty for wrongfully murdering it if she was not panicking about North in his mannequin state. Every gentle thing she tried failed to snap him out. Against her heart, she slapped him hard, and it was so hard that North dropped down from his chair. The thud brought him back to his senses.

He suddenly, instinctively, and confusedly looked around, and realized what happened. He stood up and abruptly hugged the dazed nurse. He hugged her tight, then he sobbed, then he cried. He cried for a long time, as if he was making up for all the tears he had kept in all his life. That was the first and last time Victoire saw him do so, and she had no idea what was going on. North never tried to speak the whole time he was crying (even if he did, it would be muffled) and he never spoke about it afterwards. What she did not know was that he, for the very first time in his life, confirmed to himself that he believed there is a God.



In the days that followed, North became too preoccupied with a lot of simultaneous thoughts about the rules that manage the physical world. It became painful, and the pain in his head prevented him from being able to read. This was not a setback, though, since he thought no reading could have helped him with his current ponderings, which was bugging him plenty. He tried not to think about it, but it was too late since he already started. The harder he tried to shake it off his mind, the more it stuck, and the shaking only heightened the headache. Having no choice, he gave in to the pestering thoughts, and he started by muttering Dear Lord.

By believing in the existence of an all-powerful Entity, he felt small, helpless, and ignorant. He was thinking that if a supreme being created everything, then every question that anyone can come up with must have an answer. To him, following God is not limited to following doctrines. It is about learning God’s works and exceeding current human limits to decipher the great puzzle which is the world, including everything within and beyond its material domain. To him, life and the whole of creation is a clue that would lead to finding the Creator, if one knew how to look.

North carried the burden of decoding creation everywhere his feet took him and as far as a single human mind can take. He believed that any man of any standing can do it—that a mathematician or a physicist could find Him in equations as a farmer could in the earth and its crops, but a man who amounts to nothing because he is doing nothing about his life never could. That was his problem, as he realized that despite the numerous bits of almost all available knowledge he had, he was still nothing.

Finally, the burden held him down. He became absent-minded and sometimes incoherent. The pot sessions with Sherlock Holmes did not help his mental health. North became more and more unhinged, even delusional, until one day, he convinced himself that he could foresee the future.


Continued on Part 3: North’s Revolution - Segment C
Previous: Part 3: North's revolution - Segment A

Copyright 2008 Klaro de Asis