Work Text:
Twin Peaks, Washington. 1995. Faxed at 11:09 PM Philadelphia time.
Dearest Sherriff Harry S. Truman, I write to you as a friend. Harry, I write to you as I am a man who is going through a period of partial deafness due to a great night at the Mets. But to my point, as recently as five minutes ago, we here at the Federal Bureau of Investigation received notice of a message obtained by the [blacked out] for the ongoing investigation into the [blacked out]. Harry, I realise just now after dictating those sentences that this is sensitive information and may well have to be omitted in my final draft of this electrical message. All you need to know is that we have a [blacked out] in [blacked out] for [blacked out]. Damn it. Harry, you definitely cannot know such a thing. Boy this is difficult. Skim read this till I figure out how to tell you that we received a message in the last four hours that may or may not regard the disappearance of a certain Special Agent with whom we were both acquainted with. Well. There I said it. In fact, I believe that’s all I can possibly say. That and I’m afraid we in the bureau will have to intrude on your peaceful corner of our great country once more. I am sending Albert ahead of me tonight to arrive by the morning. You remember Albert of course. Harry I would like to say more but the fact of the matter is that your life depends on my ‘keeping mum’ as they say. I also cannot hear myself speak at this time. Hoping to be with you shortly in a better condition.
Oh – Gordon Cole.
***
Lucy arrived at the station in the frost of dawn, her suede heels clicking precariously across the frozen carpark. Arms around a box of donuts, she wrangled with the front doors. A robin warbled happily. The self-proclaimed, “sicker than a dog after Christmas cake”, Deputy Brennan was soldiering through a cold at home. He had bravely declared he was still well enough to drive Wally to school, a novelty that neither of them had most days being early bird workers and she mulled on it with a touch of jealousy as she set her load down heavily on her desk. The phone rang with a jolt but Lucy was far too practiced a receptionist to even jump, ignoring it in favour of unpacking her things. It rang on. She made her way into the cubicle, seating herself comfortably with a woolen blanket over her stockinged knees and flicking the heater’s switch with her toe. It rang off. Lucy reapplied her ‘Mercedes Red’ lipstick sagely. If they wanted to be in touch they would ring back. Besides, she didn’t clock on till 7:30 so they would just have to suck it up. She was just about to reach for the latest edition of An Invitation to Love: Love Goes On and On (The book of the T.V show of the book) when a blue letterhead in the fax machine caught her eye. She scooched her chair over slowly. Something about it lying there, face up, made her heart quicken. Something like dread held her for a second, freezing her hand above the page. But only for a second, then it was gone. She read it through. The dread returned incrementally. She felt the blood draining from her face in feverish waves. “It” was coming back. Lucy hadn’t named the feeling but the FBI was the confirmation of it every time. A strange feeling, a dreamy feeling. Dangerous, like staying up too late at night and feeling the walls of the world get thin. She felt it since she was a little girl, waking in the night, crying, nobody coming. The heavy dream dragging you into fear. A voice, many voices, whispering just beyond your ear. Muffled as if behind a thick curtain. No one coming. Everyone felt like it though. She had asked her mother as much, who confirmed, yes. Everyone they knew felt it too.
***
Harry felt it. Had felt it since his own childhood. That darkness just beyond the edge of town had become an uneasy companion. Twin Peaks walked beside it. Never quite touching, then overlapping in the most terrifying ways, taking a few with it before receding once more. Still, it was a feeling that let you know you were alive. A heart stopping fear every few months, years, reminding you that at the end of the day it’s just you and it, floating alone in the universe. How to keep it at bay, how hold forth against the chill winds and that inhospitable ugliness lurking so close. This, Harry was still in the process of figuring out. He always had Frank, from day one, keeping the world at bay. Then his mother died and everything had slowed into a hellish dream, those long shadows creeping up on their unassuming existences. Frank skipped town, older than Harry by a significant hair and half incapacitated by grief and memory. He had then learned the thrill of sneaking around with Hank Jennings, someone who beckoned that darkness in, teasing it, tempting fate to his doorstep. To think of some of the stuff they had got into now made Harry shiver. He had been naïve, so green and trusting. Things like making himself dinner at the girl he was seeing’s house while her boyfriend was out, Harry in the next room with the thin young woman who couldn’t care less. Or nicking spoons from the diner. They started with spoons anyway. Sometimes Hank would steal through Harry’s window with some contraband to hide until it cooled off. He would sit on the end of Harry’s twin bed, almost on his feet, catching his breath until Harry awoke. They wouldn’t speak. Harry hardly dared; throat tight. There had been a hardened look behind Hank’s shadowed face, dark eyes glinting in the crack-of-the-door light. Then he would shake himself, leather jacket clinking, leaving the way he came in. Those nights Harry would rather forget. But sometimes they would go back to Harry’s while his dad was away on business (which he was more and more often) and use the front door and smoke his cigarettes, drink his Jack Daniels and talk for hours. Those were the good nights. Although the fear was always there with Hank, hanging smoky and acrid between them. That was the draw of him. It was why he let Hank take him to Seattle in a jacked car, spending a night in the cells before Frank came to bail him out.
He couldn’t think of Josie within the bounds of this sepia toned memory yet so he abstained. She was too bound up with others, too. After parking, Harry remained in his car for a moment. It wasn’t that he was fighting off sleep by any means, in fact, he’d been up since four. It was common for him now, he didn’t even try to contradict his own mind anymore, instead getting up to walk to the stream just below his cabin. The sky was still dark when he left, wrapped to high heaven in his woolens and still his hands lost their mobility in the duration of his short hike. He had kept moving, not daring to rest until the sun made its grey debut under copious cloud cover. The stream flowed innocuously, unaware of an audience. Flights of geese took to the air, a flock at a time. He marveled them quietly. Took note of the gargantuan firs that crowded his view, all laced with white frost. He left when his face got numb, picking his way carefully over orange pine needles and slippery roots.
He was content. He was. He didn’t spend all of his time musing on the past. He still liked fishing. He got out of the car slowly, shoulder giving him trouble, apparently only now protesting to his early morning activities. Heading up the front steps he could make out Hawk through the condensation covered inner door, leaning over Lucy’s desk. They both started at his arrival turning grimly, eyes darting to the paper in Lucy’s fingers. You wouldn’t guess the pleasant temperature of the station from their pale complexions, nor their friendly dispositions from their failure to speak. Lucy shot Hawk a significant look through the glass partition who then placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder, a gentle pressure steering him to one of the waiting room chairs.
“What’s happened?” Someone’s died. Frank probably. Probably a car accident. Coming in or out of Seattle? Would he have to see the body?
Standing before him in her pink bolero cardigan, Lucy offered the paper soberly. Harry felt frost melting off his jacket, dripping onto the carpet, soaking the backs of his slacks. He took the paper. Hawk didn’t relinquish his hand, though Harry could barely feel it as he registered the FBI letterhead. He could hear the far-off sounds of a motorbike coming around the bend, screeching on the slippery iced tarmac. All of a sudden he felt a little breathless. Gordon Cole’s volume of delivery was conveyed even through the written medium. They had a message. What kind of message? His shoulder began to cramp up with painful urgency. His hand opened involuntarily to send the paper whirling to the floor. “What kind of message? What did he say?” He asked through gritted teeth, trying to stretch his shoulder back into relaxation.
“Sherriff are you alright? Do you need a hot water bottle?” Lucy’s hair was moving at twice the speed of its owner as she swooped in. She’d had to do it before, putting all her weight into his shoulder. He felt a little like cattle.
“Why send a message about a message? Why not just send the message for chrissakes?” He now had both Hawk and Lucy bending his godforsaken shoulder back. It released it’s cramp all at once, the group of them breathing a sigh of relief. Hawk retrieved the paper, hanging over Harry’s shoulder, Lucy on his other.
“It says… well that looks like all it says,” Hawk noted astutely.
“And the certain Special Agent, capital ‘s’ capital ‘a’, is Agent Cooper?” Lucy asked, looking to Harry for confirmation.
Harry re-read the convoluted sentence. Read it once more. Tried to take in as much air as was possible through the nose. His teeth were set like steel in his locked jaw, heat gathering around his collar, lightness in his head. The shrill ring of the telephone barely made a dent in his consciousness as he fought to keep it. He was aware of Lucy trotting across the foyer to answer it, her voice sounded very far away. Hawk was peering at him in that way he had, the one where he appeared not to be peering.
“Harry?”
“Yes Hawk.”
Hawk squinted carefully, “you been waiting?” He gestured to the paper Harry had dampened with his sweaty grip.
Damn that Deputy Hill. Too good.
“Yes Hawk.”
It wasn’t shock that had Harry hold his hat against his chest, panting like he’d just run a mile. It was the fact he was almost dead from the anticipation. Hawk looked mildly satisfied though his eyebrows were still drawn up as he watched Lucy take a note with the phone held shoulder-cheek. She had shut the partition so only the barest whisper could be heard from where they sat. His shoulder gave a dull twinge. It remembered, no doubt, the last encounter they had with the creature that had worn his face. Flashes of it came to Harry, only parts, the others lost or obscured by his fearful mind. But his shoulder remembered with a stunning clarity, he tried to keep all the memory there some days. The name Cooper resided strictly in that joint of muscle and bone within the working hours. There it would stay if he had his way but here he was. Out of the shoulder and onto the page. He rolled it thoughtlessly, checking to see if it still ached. It did.
He was glad to still be sitting as Lucy announced to them: “Agent Rosenfield is ten minutes from the station he says!”
God, Albert, he had cheerfully omitted that part of the fax, another figure to be banished to the shoulder.
“Now nine minutes he says… soon to be eight he says”.
Hawk did some less subtle peering, waiting for instruction. Harry sighed. It was all he could do at that moment in time.
“Carry on as per, Hawk, call you if anything needs…doing” He faltered, hardly hearing himself speaking.
Nodding, Hawk retreated, Albert was an exhausting sort of presence for him.
“Now seven minutes Sherriff!...Well, I apologize Agent Rosenfield but he is sitting across the room from me a little indisposed so I have to raise my voice just a little bit.”
Of course, the idea of lying to sooth his ego did not and never would occur to Lucy. And neither should it, he thought morosely. Boldly, he made a play to stand for several seconds which ultimately culminated in his continued seated status. He tried once more, this time succeeding and making it all the way to his office before he could collapse in his assigned seat. His heart wasn’t in the habit of rabbiting in this way ordinarily. He prided himself on being a steady kind of animal, not one that broke out in a sweat at the mention of an old friend. Now his scarf itched. He wrestled with it briefly before his shoulder twinged again in warning and he left it, uncomfortably prickly, around his neck. A few moments of staring at his bookcase elapsed before he tried again to loosen the yellow wool, only succeeding in pulling it tighter around his throat. Panicking, he stood and attempted to get his hand through the centre of the knot only to find it quite slack, tingling and only hesitatingly responsive to his brain’s commands.
“That bad huh?” Harry jerked; hand still caught in his noose. Albert had let himself in silently, Lucy nowhere to be heard. He floundered, hot round the ears. Albert looked just the same, of course it hadn’t been so very long, but tired and regarding Harry with his usual disdain and incredulity.
“Albert,” he started, the words coming breathy and weak. Good God give him some dignity. No fear, the agent had assessed the situation and was already giggling spitefully. Harry tugged uselessly at his scarf, sure he was red to the very gills of himself with embarrassment.
“Sorry Sherriff”, Albert’s hands found the scarf’s end with ease even as he trembled with genuine mirth, “I see work’s been keeping you tied up. Get Lucy to write this one up tonight along with tying your shoelaces together this morning.”
Harry looked decidedly upwards, not even checking as Albert had hoped. So smug and self-assured, it was enough to rouse his tongue from dumbness, “I put it on in the dark.”
“Oh sure, you put it on with your eyes shut. I’m sure you bought it with them closed too.”
Harry was about to retort it was a gift from Mrs. Hayward when Albert surprised him by planting his briefcase square in the middle of his desk and pulling him, with no small amount of strength, into his arms.
“How are you Harry?”
“Jury’s out.”
“Figures,” was all Albert made in reply, squeezing him once before turning to open the briefcase. To business.
“Right. Let’s get you up to date,” he drew out an accordion folder with more files than Harry could keep in a cabinet.
“I have to sit on it to get it closed,” said Albert, glancing up at him and was that honest to God ‘good nature’ lurking in his expression?
“What is all that?” The twinkle of humour vanished as Albert levelled him a terrible look, “Harry you came into contact with just the tiniest fragment of “all that” in July of ’91 and it broke your shoulder for your trouble, think about what the rest of “all that” might look like on your joints.”
Harry shivered.
“Yeah. You don’t wanna know pal.”
“So… he’s… he’s,” Harry broke off, mumbling the rest into obscurity.
“He’s not back. To clarify. Not back.” Albert eyed him steadily.
“But…”
“But why have the FBI returned to your telenovela of a town?”
Albert paused, clearly in the thick of several mental calculations. Outside the wind howled its way through the powerlines, through the pines. It would snow, tonight maybe. Maybe in the wee hours when Harry would wake, inexplicably, full of unclaimed longing.
“But the universe is making noises,” concluded Albert. He shifted against the desk uneasily before adding, “and when the universe speaks, we listen. Or so an old friend once said.”
He handed over the second monumental document of Harry’s morning. “Here it is.”
Harry unfurled it with care. It was longer than his arm and lined from border to border with what looked like computer coding. Numbers and letters interspersed with dashes. “
Do you remember Major Garland Briggs?”
“Of course.”
“He was in a very specific line of work. Interpreting noise from outer galaxies. Adjacent to ours. Sometimes closer than we know. Space isn’t just happening out there y’know.”
“Oh, I know.”
Albert frowned, “you shouldn’t.”
“Part and parcel of living in our telenovela town.”
Looking back at the paper across his lap, Harry gave a double take, “Hey! Is that…”
“Yeah. That’s why we’re back.”
Through one of the lines of gibberish text there was a word, and the word was COOPER. It repeated twice more before being engulfed in white noise once more.
“And further on, here,” Albert pointed down the page to a cluster of C’s. “And here,” Albert pointed again to where it read, “DIANE.” Harry couldn’t help smiling, the name he’d heard a thousand times without seeing her face.
“I know, she herself was most flattered.”
“I bet.”
“And so you should be,” Albert flipped the paper to reveal the same, pointing to a corner of text that read, “HARRY” and once more, further on in the next line.
Harry stared. He could feel himself twisted in a scowl that was nothing more than a distraction from the emotion welling in the back of his throat. He would not cry in front of another government official. Perhaps it was the too hopeful aspect of him that attributed these cryptic words to Cooper. It could just as easily be another, a mimic. There was nothing to suggest it was or wasn’t. But the image was too powerful for Harry to resist. Cooper. Somewhere. Unassuming, polite, determined Cooper. Trying to make his presence known, floating alone in the depth of the universe. Waiting, as Harry had done, for rescue.
Albert broke his reverie with a pointed look, “that’s the long and short of it. All came in at around 8PM Philly time.”
Harry nodded slowly, “where do we go from here?”
“That’s for Gordon to decide. We were sent to survey the area, both the initial disappearance and the subsequent incident.”
He busied himself with packing away the case, both of them falling into silence. The subsequent incident. Right. Harry followed him into the foyer, noting with despair the thinness of Albert’s great coat. Albert disputed this soundly on the basis of good taste which died in his mouth the moment they opened the front doors.
“I’ll bring you one of mine.”
“Must I be both cold and frumpy?” He shucked on his aviators, “how will they know I’m famous?”
Harry was walking him to the car before he even realised it. “Infamous is the word.”
If Albert smiled he did it inwardly. “How have you been Harry?”
“Very well, Albert. All things considered,” it was an honest an answer as Harry could possibly give.
“Good. Well, forgive me but I have to be off before my sympathetic tears freeze on my face.”
Indeed, the icy breeze was already rendering itself in mauve across Albert’s pleasantly tanned countenance. He tossed his briefcase in the passenger seat, then regarded Harry intensely. There was nothing soft about Albert, to say so would be misrepresenting what it felt like to be around him e.g. rather like a mouse under a bird of prey. There were teeth and claws to be stood clear of if you knew what was good for you. But his hand was warm. He squeezed Harry’s shoulder lightly, thumb digging in slightly, always the doctor, searching for the spot that made Harry wince. He patted him once he had found it, satisfied for now.
“We’ll call you tomorrow,” he said. And he was gone.
***
Lucy watched them idly through the small, condensation covered window. She unwrapped another chocolate from her desk drawer and deposited the wrapper in the desk drawer below that. A cold blast of air let her know the Sheriff had re-entered and she closed her mouth over the morsel quickly. He made for her desk. Lucy tried to chew and swallow her chocolate as he approached but it was too late.
“Any word from Cole?”
Lucy nodded, shuffling in her yellow notepad before turning to Cole’s jumbled dictation. She held it strategically in front of her mouth as she was called to answer.
“Uh yes, he says he will be arriving sometime tomorrow, due to the impending weather he said. And he said to “sit tight and keep an eye” in the meantime.”
He nodded, too distracted to even notice her chocolate eating. She swallowed the last of it, noting the unhappy mouth, the overly bright eyes.
“Sheriff, I have to tell you about a feeling I had just now when you and Agent Rosenfield were in your office.”
“Go ahead Lucy,” the Sheriff leaned his elbows on the desk.
Lucy concentrated; it was important to convey this moment with accuracy. “Well, Agent Rosenfield arrived, he was grumpy in the lobby, then he was grumpy down the hallway, then he went into your office before I could even tell you but then I was going to tell you but then I had the strangest feeling. All up and down me, I was hot and cold and goosebumpy. It was like I was waking up from a dream but I was already awake. But… maybe I wasn’t? Something happened I think, Sheriff Truman. You know how you read those stories about wives who’s husbands get killed on the road and they know before they even get the call? It was like I was waiting for the call. I could feel a part of myself work that had never worked before. Like a second heart, I guess. Or a bit of the brain that hasn’t been discovered. It knew something. That something had happened.”
Harry looked unusually struck, resting the crown of his head against the partition. Lucy took this as a sign to continue. “So, I go to ring Andy just in case but before I get to the phone, it rings! And I pick it up and say, “What is it?” and I’m scared because what if it’s the police?”
“Lucy we are the police,” he smiled.
“I mean what if it was Mrs. Finn from next door saying Andy has died falling off a ladder or electrocuting himself on the toaster but then it wasn’t Mrs. Finn, it was Andy. And he was asking if I just got a feeling and I said yes. We both had one. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t know,” he spoke so softly, Lucy almost didn’t catch it.
In fact, he seemed so lost that Lucy had to stand and grasp one of his wrists affectionately, “Don’t worry about it Sheriff, you don’t have to know. I was only saying. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
He coughed and drew himself up again, face red, an unreadable expression on his placid features. Lucy watched as he retreated in a daze down the hallway and did not emerge from his office until after she had left.
***
Harry woke just after snow fall, close to four in the morning. He preferred not to call them ‘night terrors’. The visions that plagued him between the hours of eleven and four were hardly imagined. They were not even embellished with the heightened state of ‘dream’ you might expect. It was a simple repetition of facts. It scared the hell out of him. Waking up feeling more beast than man, sweat running down his back, heart beating to wake the dead like some wild, hunted thing. Perhaps terror was the most accurate word for it. Still, it felt a great exaggeration after the adrenaline wore off. When he was dressed and drinking coffee at the kitchen counter, feeling more like his organs were in order, no longer a mess of intestines and amygdala between the sheets (that’s, all guts and fear and not much to pin him together). It became hard to imagine himself at such a low ebb when he was out of it. But slipping under, the gathering dread brushing his teeth, reading (as Doc Hayward suggested, Donna’s old copy of Jane Eyre). It wasn’t his usual speed, not reading much for pleasure excepting the weather, but he was creeping through it with growing curiosity.
However tonight, when Harry was already in a restless state of mind he witnessed the culmination of Mr. Rochester’s rejected proposal, aghast. A character he had dared grow fond of, grabbed poor Jane bodily, shaking her, musing on the fragility of her frame. “A mere reed she feels in my hand!” said Mr. Rochester and Harry couldn’t prevent his mind from going there. A reed snapping in two with the gravity, the muted crunch of bone. The spectre of BOB rising from the page, eyes wide and wild. His shoulder locked. Torn between throwing the offending book across the room and the need to see his narrator liberated, the latter won out. He switched hands, soothing his own shoulder as best he could, keeping the fear at bay as he read on. She was going, she was going, she was running. She was out. She had escaped. Harry’s eyes dropped closed.
She was still running like the dickens through the yellow grass, but she had Lucy’s heeled boots on. Harry glimpsed them as she raised her grey hem to clear a stream. The river ran, lined with pine needles, to a thick knot of trees. Harry stepped into the darkness cautiously, hand always at his hip. Then a deeper, darker night descended. Harry was running, stumbling and dumb through a more familiar forest. It was the point of summer where everything turns to rot, damp and pungent. His chest hurt but he could hear the second set of footsteps falling just behind him. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. Harry knew it wasn’t, but it didn’t make it any less heart stopping to see that face leer at him out of the shadows. He struck Harry once, hard enough to knock him to the ground, ears ringing. They did not speak save for the grunts of struggle as Harry caught his leg, writhing with him in the dirt. The white face was twisted with rage. Good, Harry thought. He used all his strength to pin him, to yell. But the body was no body at all; it was steel, unyielding, bloodless stone. A swift knee to Harry’s stomach had him gasping for air, unable to cry out. His vision began to spot with lack of oxygen. The body that was not a body, slender but graceless, hauled him up under the arms like he was nothing at all. Harry thrashed all he could, making trouble with his teeth, biting hard, feeling flesh tear. His assailant emitted a low, animal noise of pain and put it’s hands on Harry’s collar bone, ivory fingers clawing, searching out the vulnerable length of bone. It found what it was looking for, looking into Harry’s eyes for a moment before it wrenched, with inhuman strength, Harry’s shoulder out of it’s socket. An ear-splitting howl echoed like a choir of furies through the thick forest on all sides. It could have been the both of them. It was still holding him close, looking into his eyes again, though you wouldn’t know they were eyes if they didn’t blink. They were so lifeless; they were closer to a plank of wood. Harry had drawn out his gun, did it know? Surely it did. It would all end soon, Harry was sure. But he wouldn’t go without putting at least one bullet through it.
Jane Eyre was tangled in his bed clothes somewhere near his foot. He struggled to keep his consciousness, if he wasn’t careful, his brain would gladly run through it all again. Outside, snow had gathered on the eaves of his window, beckoning him into the still of a frozen night. Harry obliged gladly.
His shoulder ached. Throbbed with every beat of his heart as he struggled his boots on. Sometimes his hand would lose feeling, go limp and frightening as it had when he struggled with his scarf. He didn’t tell Doc Hayward, suspecting there was something vague and Cooperish wrong with it. Something modern medicine couldn’t fix. Besides, it happened to rarely and so briefly it hardly bore thinking about.
His shoulder ached. He walked on through the firs, brushing away their feathery touches. It was important for it to be dark, to be almost dream. There was a centre of hurt within him that in dreams, Harry could walk towards with arms outstretched. How to wrap his mind around Cooper. Every lovely thing. He had never just liked someone so instantaneously. At first meeting he had struck him as a child’s approximation of what a grown up might look and speak like. A first graders drawing of a man. A face of painted porcelain. The low, vivacious voice full of intent, hopeful interest. Watching him at work you could easily place him in an after school special, perhaps warning pre-teens on the dangers of dope smoking. Almost otherworldly, elfish, like a creature you couldn’t help but follow into the ring. Little hint of carnality to his person save for the uncanny nature of his smile, impish, alarming at first. He was all made of suit to Harry till he got close enough, then Cooper was all too human, all too quickly. Too flesh and blood to be so wired to the moon. It was dangerous. Sometimes right beside him, sometimes a million miles away, calling Harry in the middle of the night, his measured tone breathless with excitement.
He walked on, the first of the sun blanching the sky grey. He had leaned his chin on Harry’s shoulder one night. They had got into the whiskey, toasting over open case files. He was beaming, alight with joy and good will to man, delighting in the liquor as much as the company. Harry felt too sloppy to even think as Cooper pressed his cheek to Harry’s, pointing to something on the desk, laughing into his ear with a hand gripping the flesh of his ribs in an effort to stay upright. The next morning had revealed a purple branding at the site of the offence and Harry had felt stupid with it, fingers flying to check it every spare moment of the day. Now in daylight that memory was to be left strictly alone, a pink, swollen sore. This message, if it could be called that. This communication had disturbed it beyond what Harry was sure he was ready for. His hand had gone limp again. He put it in his pocket.
He returned to his cabin before six o’clock, ravenous as all hell. The fridge was in a sorry state boasting only a jar of pickles and an old container of soup that Harry hadn’t been sure about when he made it. Admittedly he was a bird like feeder, a purveyor of snacking, rarely having time for a full sit-down affair. The Double R would be open in an hour or so, in the meantime, Harry fished out a frozen banana and an old bit of bread in the bottom of the bag. Perhaps delirious with a lack of sleep, he put the banana under the hot tap to thaw and immediately nodded off on the couch.
He woke with a start at eight thirty with the phone ringing. Gathering his bearings as best he could, he picked up, ready to apologise to Lucy for his tardiness. Instead, he had to step back from the receiver as Gordon Cole yowled on the other end, “HARRY ARE YOU THERE? ALBERT SAID THAT YOU WOULD BE AT HOME.”
“Yes, Gordon I’m here.”
“WELL, WHETHER YOU ARE OR YOU AREN’T, WOULD YOU MEET US AT THE GREAT NORTHERN FOR A LATE BREAKFAST? THEN WE ARE OF COURSE GOING TO CHECK ON A FEW THINGS, I WOULD LIKE TO STOP FOR LUNCH AT THAT DINER.”
There was some shuffling on the line, “HARRY I MUST LET YOU GO, A MAN HAS JUST SLIPPED AND HIT HIS HEAD ON A TABLE CORNER AND THEY WANT TO CALL THE PARAMEDICS.”
***
He arrived at the Great Northern to find Gordon and Albert already tucking into a plate of waffles each, napkins over their black suits. Gordon rose when he spotted him, “HELLO HARRY.”
He waved over a waitress, bidding Harry order. Albert caught his eye over a pile of bacon, “Sleep well?”
Harry smiled, drawing a hand over his face. That was enough of an answer for Albert to give him some of the bacon. Gordon gave a run down to the two sitting at his table (as well as the rest of the dining hall) on the information the bureau had gleaned on Cooper’s potential whereabouts between his initial disappearance and the present.
“WE FIGURED THE DESTRUCTION OF THE DOUBLE MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT,” Gordon looked hard at Harry. It had been him that had got Harry out of being taken to trial over the technical killing of a bureau official, though Harry hadn’t known that fact until a year later.
“Why now? Why not then?” Asked Harry, it had been almost five years.
Albert answered, “Time is largely immaterial in cases such as these.”
Harry wondered, mildly alarmed, how many staff members the two men had lost to the soul-eating ether or whatever it was. If the state knew anything of it.
Gordon waved his bacon dismissively, "TIME IS NO OBJECT HARRY. NO OBJECT AT ALL."
“This much I know,” mused Harry, mostly to himself and picked at his eggs benedict.
Harry drove them, a kind of trembling hopefulness in his extremities, leading him to make a sharp turn that had the car full of agents lurching against the window and cussing him out in Albert’s case. The site of Cooper’s disappearance had not changed. Even the log that Harry had sat on all that wretched night was still there, half rotted and dotted with fungi. The snow had fallen sparsely here though it was still bitterly cold. Harry had blessedly remembered a jacket for Albert but didn’t anticipate his colleagues equal level of unpreparedness (bar Cole, who declared he had been a boy scout and had two hats on before he even stepped out of the car). The other cavalcade of agents, shivering in their black suits and shiny shoes like a murder of crows, were advised to return to the car by Harry, then ordered by Cole. “HYPOTHERMIA’S THE LAST THING WE NEED,” he said, herding them back.
Harry and Albert set off through the trees at a brisk pace, Cole bringing up the rear. Not a soul was stirring save for a merry woodpecker, following them in the branches above. The clearing was just as banal as it had been before. They made a loop, stopping back at the log to stare once more at the place where those red curtains had appeared. When Cole called their fieldwork for that morning, Harry felt loath to turn his back on that spot, as though it might materialise around him all of a sudden. Pulling him into a place where time was “immaterial”. He chanced a glance over his shoulder. Still, there was nothing. Albert was leant against the car in Harry’s ski jacket, making full use of the built-in mittens, “Lunch?”
They all squeezed into the one booth, Cole flirting all the while with Shelley who seemed unperturbed. He watched Norma plate up something through the little window to the kitchen. She vanished from sight. Harry stared at the empty frame, caught in a vision of the back of Annie Blackburn’s head, the one that used to grace that space. It was so vivid, real but for the unnatural light behind her. Or was she emitting it herself? An almost childish, angel’s glow. Harry looked down to his plate, her image still projected, shimmering, onto the empty ceramic.
According to Norma she had retreated once more to her convent to be looked after there. Harry had only seen her once after she woke, having just been hospitalised himself with his busted right shoulder and broken ribs. He had shuffled into her room with Hawk at his side, Andy on the other with notepad in hand. In vain, it was revealed, as she couldn’t yet speak. Harry wondered if she ever did again. She had looked up at him with her wide, intelligent eyes and stared and stared. Not a vacant stare, but a searching one. Harry knew why Cooper had fallen for her, how they had fallen for each other. They had the same gentle manner of expression. The same exacting movements, like golden age film stars, lying like discarded dolls, flat on their backs, eyes to the sky.
Norma stroked her forehead protectively, whispering occasionally into her pallid cheek to the effect of a small, tired smile. Her white legs neatly together, her wild, beauty queen hair matted with blood. He took a long blink. Who had been beside her? Cooper? Or had it been Earle? He sighed unconsciously deeply. Albert knocked his foot, eyebrows raised. Gordon caught on, “WHAT IS IT HARRY?”
Harry took a large bite of his pie, shaking his head and feigning politeness.
Gordon nodded knowingly, “I MISS HIM TOO. YOU KNOW COOPER WAS NOT ONLY ONE OF THE BEST AGENTS THE BUREAU HAD IN ITS POCKET, HE WAS ALSO A CLOSE PERSONAL FRIEND AND ONE I WAS DEEPLY SADDENED TO LOSE.”
The whole diner turned in their seats, subtly letting their ears alight upon Gordon’s natural ruckus. Shelly’s curious face peeped through the kitchen window.
“LET ALBERT TELL YOU, WHEN WE GOT BACK TO PHILADELPHIA AFTER WHAT HAPPENED HE DIDN’T EAT FOR A WEEK AND THEN DISAPEARRED HIMSELF FOR THREE DAYS.”
“I was visiting the liberty bell,” glared Albert.
He attacked his pie with yet untapped ferocity, fork scraping the ceramic. The diner winced in a collective body. Nothing and more nothing was all they were to uncover in the rest of the day. Gordon seemed unperturbed in the heated car driving back to the Great Northern, flicking through the radio stations merrily, volume up tenfold.
“HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS ONE?”
“It’s static,” came Albert’s voice, cutting from the backseat. Gordon didn’t look put out at all, tapping on the dash along to a non-existent tune.
***
They began with drinks at the hotel bar, Harry and Albert. Overpriced and “under sauced” as Albert put it, drowning what they couldn’t admit was disappointment. They moved to a booth when a party of Irish businessmen sat near them and started singing raucously. Albert was interested in the bird life of Twin Peaks, whether a personal or professional interest, Harry couldn’t tell. He asked any casual question in such a way, Harry felt he was under oath. He should get a drink with Ed sometime. Ed didn’t ask if they had robins around these parts with such seriousness. He didn’t mind, not really. He was happy to elaborate on seasonal residents and permanent ones. They shared a look about owls and drank to eagles in a sudden moment of patriotism. Wrens were covered lightly, woodpeckers mused on and blue jays appreciated mildly. Harry talked about the bird watching he’d done with his dad back in the day. Albert wasn’t exactly looking at him but nodded like he was listening every so often. Sometimes he even smiled. Harry wondered at his acceptance of the conversation at all but he seemed content enough, at ease, even. Leaning back ever so slightly, nursing his whisky slowly. Harry stuck to beer, whiskey turned his guts nowadays. Somehow they got on to fishing. Albert had never been. Before thinking Harry was offering to take him, Albert whipped his head round all of a sudden, a knowing little smile on him and Harry felt bodily just what a country bumpkin he sounded.
"Just if you want, I mean. Not good this time of year anyway."
Albert didn't answer right away, appeared to chasten himself with a swig of his drink and sighing wearily. "I would like to, Harry. Very much."
The Irish band picked their moment to advance on the pair, two fiddles outstretched menacingly and they made their escape to Albert’s room, who until this moment had seemed entirely unaffected by his three-drink party. He was light on his feet even inebriated, chortling and being something Harry had never known him to be – warm. And he had warmth, had it in spades. All damned up in that slick suit. Settled on Albert’s bed, too hot in his sheepskin, they hit their inevitable lull. Albert hiked a leg up on the bed and took a swig of a mini bottle with a grimace. Divested of his jacket, it was the most relaxed Harry had ever seen him. Still, he was tense, polishing off the bottle, glancing up at Harry with a look that said 'hit me'.
“Cooper,” he prompted when it became clear Harry was not going to offer up first.
Harry felt himself go red and mulishly hoped it would go unnoticed. Too bad. Albert was already laughing softly, squeezing his arm. “Yeah Harry. Me too.”
Harry tried to surreptitiously wipe his palms on the bedspread, he couldn’t open his mouth or his eyes would tell tales of him.
“He talked about you a lot y’know,” Albert said quietly. He wasn’t looking at Harry, facing the window opposite the bed where hailstones of a comical size were hitting the glass.
“And so highly,” Albert shook his head, “he thought you just about hung the moon Truman. I’ll admit to a little jealousy.”
Harry drew back his hand to cuff him across the head playfully. He could face glowing with shameful delight. Albert kicked him in the shin with a dress shoe, it hurt in a satisfying kind of way.
“Harry this, Harry that. Harry, oh whatta guy, the consummate professional. The Sheriff every town deserves.”
Harry scoffed, “I wasn’t.”
“No, you weren’t”, Albert agreed. Harry cuffed him again, lightly about the ear. “You weren’t. You were a white knight and you know it.”
Harry did know it but he aimed for another blow anyway, it was keeping a smile on Albert’s face at least.
“But he loved you. And love makes us blind,” he couldn’t say it without rolling his eyes, catching Harry by the wrist with ease and pushing it back to him roughly. He fell back to the pillows, eye glittering in the half light.
Understanding very little, Harry opened his mouth and let words fall from it. “Coop told me you were a… snarling thing. Once, after I hit you,” he said, with conscience enough to feel sheepish.
“He said you were born with it. It was your nature, is what he was trying to say. I think.”
Albert gave him a blow on the head with an overstuffed pillow looking halfway to contemplative, flushed, bitter and embarrassed at once.
“He loved you, Albert. I know that much.”
Albert was quiet. Harry thought for a moment he had fallen asleep.
“How can you live here?” His voice soft and despairing. “I know people disappear all over this godforsaken country, I’m FBI. But this place.”
Harry knew what he meant. Where people walk into the dark, their retreating forms glowing under flashlights, never returning, never looking back.
“You really hate it that much?”
Albert leant up on an elbow. “I really do. Not more than any other backwater shack in these parts but for the fact that um- ” he coughed, “but for the fact that it took him.”
Harry reached, found his ankle, held it. “It’ll bring him back.”
“You really believe that simple-Simon?”
He gripped his ankle tighter in warning, glaring down at the rotten prince, “I do believe it. Just you wait.”
Albert appraised him. “You been waiting Sheriff Truman?”
“Like a fisherman for trout.”
***
They stood awkwardly at the door, unsure how to say goodbye. Gordon had called to confirm their departure the following morning and Albert was already slumping with tiredness. Harry supposed he was a mirror image.
“Heard of Wuthering Heights?” Albert asked with an impish expression.
“Is that another Bronte? Because I think I’m calling it quits with those dames,” Harry was opening the door, stepping into the warm light of the hallway.
“Sounding out the words take you too long?” Harry swatted at him with his hat. “Gordon’s reading it. Out loud,” he added meaningfully, “reminds me of here.”
They dithered, suddenly shy of each other again. They had tread nothing but new ground today.
“So, when can I expect the FBI back in the Northwest?”
Albert scowled and darted forwards, kissing him quickly on the cheek. It was a fleeting, perfunctory movement, as if he were filing a paper rather than sharing an act reserved for friends, lovers and little old ladies who looked like his mother.
However brief and un-tender it may have been, that prick of warmth on Harry’s cheekbone travelled through his body with alarming intensity. From another it may have meant next to nothing but this was Albert who kept his body as a vessel for business. Who moved for the bureau and no one but. The man cleared his throat, lounging in the doorway, dark eyes flicking nervously over Harry like he hadn’t expected to go so far, his mouth pursed in thought. Harry, to his infinite surprise, found a want; a want that rapidly developed into desperation to feel the give of that mouth, the tense frame, to run his palms up the torso, over the shoulders, down the back and give the man a good rumpling. Even in the low light he could never be mistaken for another, as much as Harry’s imagination kept Cooper for clandestine fantasies in shadowed hallways, it was Albert before him. And what’s more, he was glad of it. They both needed to work something off. Both wanted to, he amended at Albert’s searching eyes. His chest rose and fell raw against his undershirt. Shoulder ached. Blood raced too fast. The beginning of a headache started at his temple. Albert, ever cannier than he would let on, caught him by his bad shoulder deliberately, pulling him, wincing, into an embrace.
Hesitantly, lips were pressed just east of Harry’s ear, kissing his cheek again, evoking the shamefully violent shiver of a man untouched in four years. Harry couldn’t help enveloping him further, dropping his head onto his shoulder and breathing him in, all whiskey, smoke and hotel soap. He was strangely silent in Harry’s arms, holding back razor blades, Harry knew, as he permitted himself to feel as he liked the man’s body under the spread of his hands, warm and pulsing with life. He trailed his hands surely down his sides, holding him just so under the leanly muscled ribcage, feeling his stomach rise and fall before running his palms over the parameters of his person. Touching whatever he could reach, suddenly starving for it. Albert to his credit, very sportingly allowed himself to be felt up. Harry caught the wheeze of his laughter buried in his neck.
“M’ not a horse.”
But he looked so punch drunk and happy as Harry pulled back, he had to kiss him. Had to, jeez, it was only polite after groping someone in full view of a hallway. Kissing him was sweeter than Harry would have expected, Albert being far from a sentimentalist. Maybe he sensed he was kissing one and decided to be a little noble. He let Harry cup his face, and grabbed his ass only once, choosing instead to run deft fingers through Harry’s hair. It was the polite thing to do. Harry, nearly overwhelmed with the deluge of sensation felt nothing but content. That old rum feeling was coursing through his veins. The one where he was a lover and nothing else ‘sides. He had missed it, took to it like a duck to water always. He felt Albert resist and resolve to him, back and forth they went in a heady debate. No different from their usual tete a tete. Harry had never enjoyed butting heads with people but Albert was different. It was his nature and far be it for Harry to deny somebody their nature. He would give him a wrestling match if he wanted one.
The longer they went on, the less Albert acquiesced to his romanticism. Grabby and irritable, he was pulling Harry against him and boldly sliding cold hands under his shirt. In a certain mood, Harry sensed. It was their talk of Cooper maybe. Albert broke away and his face was softer and younger than Harry had ever seen it. How old was he anyway? The world weariness had let him alone in the brief emergence from a kiss, now he had his hands in Harry’s hair again, a glimmer of victory in his eyes.
“I have to go early,” he warned, the gravel in his voice made Harry want to pin him down or something. Perhaps be pinned himself. He realised he was panting too.
“I don’t mind,” he said too quickly. His legs were weakening in spite of that brave hearted statement. The sweet spot of pleasure blooming between them was making his head spin itself silly.
“And I won’t call you,” Albert said, leading him back up against the open door, hand on Harry’s neck. “Can’t”.
“I don’t mind,” Harry rasped. Albert made an imperceptible noise, perhaps only discernible in pages of code from outer space but Harry caught it eagerly right off his lips.
“And I-” Albert pulled away, breathless and laughing again. His hair stuck up in an odd way and Harry couldn’t help laughing along with him, unsure of the reason.
“What?”
He just shook his head, still smiling. Dug his nose into Harry’s shirt collar and laved his mouth, hot and open there, right on the fault line of his torn-up shoulder. He could only gasp like a caught fish, every molecule in his body ablaze with knee weakening, chest flushing, clawing, biting, blinding desire. As Albert let the door shut, breaking away to lead him to the bed once more, he thought he might well expire. It was only natural; he had been waiting so very long.
***
He woke, alone and happy for the first time in a long time. He appreciated, peering at his watch, that four o'clock had come and gone, now a pleasant seven fourty-five. The sheets had been half made around him, his jacket lying in the doorway to the bathroom. Albert had left no trace visible of himself. He wandered down the lobby in search of his car only to have the receptionist inform him the agent had assured her that Harry Truman would cover their tab from the night before. And they say chivalry is dead.
“It would never work between us,” Albert said a week later over the phone, “I don’t have enough hidden depths for you to plumb Sheriff.”
He had called after all, dignity enough to be a little shamefaced about it.
“I don’t know Albert,” he wasn’t going to bother with titles, not when the memory of their liaison still sparked a confused sort of fire in him.
“Don’t know what?”
He sighed happily, tracing a fading pen over the back of a criminal record, “you had depth enough I reckon.”
He could feel Albert rolling his eyes on the other end, “gee thanks Shakespeare.”
“Just sayin’”
“Yeah, well. Just calling to say... y’know.” The line went quiet. Harry decided to let him struggle on through an emotionally charged sentence he was clearly unequipped to finish.
“I uh- I enjoyed myself.” Stunning effort considering the man.
“Yeah I know.”
“Shut up, you did too you lug.”
Harry could not deny this.
“I just thought- ah nevermind this was a stupid idea.”
“Naw Albert. It’s good. Good to hear your voice.”
He heard a suppressed exhalation.
“Well, keep a weather eye.”
“Will do.”
“Call me if anything- if anything pops up.”
“Okay darlin’”
“And don’t call me darlin’”
“Why not darlin’?” God, he hoped Lucy wasn’t listening.
Albert spluttered, “because you are not a farmhand in a bodice ripper and I am not a southern belle. Or a cow.”
Always one for a striking image, Albert. Harry mopped his brow.
“Okay champ.”
“Let’s end this. I have to go. Don’t you have a job?”
“Yeah. See you sometime sweetheart.”
He grinned at Albert’s outraged silence, so pleased that his curt, “yeah, bye.” Did nothing to dampen his spirits.
***
Lucy click-clacked to her car, eyes wide to the dusk. She would drive slowly, she decided. She hoped Andy was sitting still at home. She amended that, she hoped he was making dinner. And that Wally had eaten all his lunch and was in his pajamas. She needed to relax, Hawk said to her as he clocked out.
“It’d be good for your writing too,” he had said, referring to her attempts at poetry. They had spoken about it at length, Andy trying his hand too so for an hour or so each morning the briefing room was awash with their clumsy rhyming. Hawk was an encouraging teacher, always picking out something to like of their pieces although Lucy secretly didn’t think much of any of them.
They couldn’t, try as they might, express anything close to what they felt. Going round and round in circles of adjectives and verbiage that lead them down alien pathways, strange and sticky sentences, meanings obfuscated and confused. She sighed. It was so easy in An Invitation to Love, where the villains twirled their moustaches to show their evil intent and maidens heaved their bosoms in innocence. Lucy had no such delusions about the real world, though she wished it might be a little simpler at least for her own ease of poeticising. It was hard to look at head on. Twin Peaks was like looking at an oncoming logging truck and having to hold your ground. Some days or nights at least.