Influence

by Chris Parker

  Something in the certainty of Marcus’s voice and the very words he used made Paul feel as if his head was spinning. He realised that he was trying to recall his father’s voice, to hear it as he had only a few minutes earlier, and he could not. He felt as if a part of him was scurrying around the edges of his mind, searching for the place where that particular voice was stored, seeking to unhook it from its hiding place, to expose it.

  For some reason the memory of a childhood holiday in Spain flittered through his awareness. Paul had been a young boy under a bright blue sky in a tall, gothic city. He was standing at the entrance to a cathedral, staring into its beautifully sculptured emptiness. He had felt that the great power of the place lay not in its architecture, its religious symbols or its art, but in the ability of the space to hold the history and beliefs of generations. He had heard himself whisper the word, ‘Echo’ with reverence and awe in acknowledgement of something so profound that he could not put any other words to it.

  He realised suddenly that neither he nor Marcus had spoken for – how long? It felt, quite literally, like ages.

  Paul looked Marcus in the eyes and that was the cue for the consultant to start talking again.

  ‘Too often, for those people who are not skilled at managing the past, memories are pulled from their resting place by stimuli they encounter in the present.”

  ‘Can you help me – teach me – how to manage those memories, the voices?’

  ‘I’m already teaching you, aren’t I?’

  Paul felt the internal space again. ‘Yes. I just don’t know how you are doing it.’

  ‘You are paying me to help you change, not for you to understand the process.’

  Paul saw the same smile, the one that suggested some deep remembering and knowing, come again. It reinforced the immeasurable difference between him and the man opposite.

  Marcus shifted in his seat. “However, as I have already said the only aspect of time that we cannot take by the scruff of the neck and lead wherever we choose is the future. The challenge is that we have to create the future amidst a mass of opposing and apathetic forces. Only the rarest of all individuals can control the future.’

  That idea added further to Paul’s sense of shock. ‘Control the future! Who are the people that can do that?’

  Marcus Kline looked up at the ceiling. ‘I would call them modern day Shamans,’ he said.

  17.

  Anne-Marie Wells was unsure whether she wanted to rush time along and jump quickly into her future, or freeze time and stay exactly where she was. To fast-forward would be to know the answer to the question that was tugging at her mind and stomach in equal measure. To freeze-frame would mean never needing to know, to be able to relax with things as they were because they could never change.

  Anne-Marie looked out of her kitchen window at the large weeping willow that spread out over the furthest corner of the garden, leaning inwards slightly towards the house, reaching down to brush the grass as if gently caressing the earth with its tears.

  The tree was at least seven metres tall. Samuel, who had tended the garden for far longer than Anne-Marie had lived in the house, told her that it was eighteen years old and had been planted by the previous owners. Anne-Marie was drawn to it more than any of the garden’s other inhabitants. Even as a young girl she had dreamed of one day owning a house with a weeping willow in the garden. She didn’t know why. She thought occasionally, that it might be related to some childhood experiences or stories that, although long-forgotten, had influenced her in some deep and lasting way. Or perhaps it was because she found something almost spiritual in the fact that, no matter how tall it grew, the weeping willow always reached back down to the earth, to its roots. Ultimately, though, Anne-Marie was happy to simply accept the attraction without needing to be able to explain or justify it. She believed, as much as she believed anything, that learning and connection and growth existed most obviously and immediately in the silence of experience and not in the description or labeling of that experience through language.

  Anne-Marie was a professional photographer. Or as one journalist had described her recently, a philosopher with a camera, a seeker behind the lens. Despite the lack of clarity about her love of weeping willows and, indeed, many other things in her life, Anne-Marie was absolutely clear about the moment when she discovered her life path.

  It had been November 1995. She had just turned twenty-one, had completed a teaching degree and was filled with the shocking emptiness that came from realizing that she didn’t want to be a teacher. It wasn’t just that she had spent three years learning how to do something only to discover that she could never possibly apply that learning. It was more to do with the realization that she didn’t just want a career. She wanted an absolute and unbreakable synergy between who she was and what she did.

  Anne-Marie didn’t want to teach in the way that her lecturers and her fellow students understood the role. She wanted to structure and present experiences and through them provide opportunities for others to interpret, emote and decide. Real teaching, she believed, came about through creating opportunities and not simply providing answers. Unfortunately, such certainty had only served to prevent her from joining a profession; it had not helped her to identify what she should do.

  And then she had seen, quite by accident, the November issue of The New Yorker magazine filled with the photo essay titled ‘In Memory of the late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort’, shot by the great photographer – in the eyes of some, the greatest ever photographer – Richard Avedon. The beautiful, violent, humorous fable was open to interpretation on every level. It spoke to her in a way that words never could. It made the base of her spine tingle. It made her appreciate that the emptiness inside her was just an open road waiting to be travelled. In that one morning, through those pages, Anne-Marie not only saw how she would live her life, she also felt that for the very first time she had come face-to-face with her true purpose.

  From that day on she had immersed herself in the world of photography. Over the years she had come to develop her craft, build her reputation, and appreciate that no matter how skilled she became or how honest her intention, she never managed to share an experience in all its absolute completeness with her audience. Something changed the instant the camera recorded the reality before it. Some things were lost and, equally, some things were enhanced. Now she understood precisely what Richard Avedon, her inspiration, had meant when he said, ‘The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.’

  The search to capture that truth had become one that captivated her. She had begun her work delighted by the fact that people could draw their own interpretations from her images. Over time she had increasingly become obsessed with the idea of taking one photograph that captured a shared truth, a photograph that created a common, deep-rooted response in all who saw it.

  According to her husband, Marcus Kline, it was an unachievable goal. He said that every interaction was so multi-layered and every individual perspective so state dependent that it was impossible to create anything, let alone a photograph, that could produce the same reaction and provide the same insights in everyone who experienced it.

  And so Anne-Marie had found herself searching to achieve something that according to arguably the greatest photographer of all time and the world’s leading communications guru was impossible. To make matters worse, the communications guru was the man she had been living with for nine years. She, more than anyone else, knew how incredibly skilled he was and how rarely he was wrong. She also knew that, for all his personal desire for success, he was equally committed to supporting her. Only in this case he had been unable to. ‘It isn’t as if we are talking about taking the perfect photo’, he had said. ‘The pursuit of perfection is a noble cause even though, by definiti
on, it is unattainable. No, here we are talking about trying to transform one thing into another – in this case a tangible experience into a photograph – without anything being changed through the transformation. To produce a photograph that only influences in one universal way.’

  Marcus had shaken his head in bewilderment and then stroked her hair as he offered his final assessment. ‘Not even I would go in search of something that is so far over the horizon. And you know that when it comes to setting new standards I’ll go further than anyone else.’

  That should have been enough to rein in Anne-Marie’s desire. After all, you would have to be stark raving mad to ignore Richard Avedon’s comments about the nature and, by implication, the limits of photography, and Marcus Kline’s analysis of communication. Only for some reason, as inexplicable as her attraction to the willow tree, their words had only strengthened her resolve.

  Anne-Marie believed that, for all their differences, people were, at heart, far more intimately connected than was commonly acknowledged. She thought it was far more than a shared social, or group, consciousness; more significant than the power of crowds. There just had to be something. Anne-Marie didn’t know what precisely.

  One less label.

  One less barrier to have to see through.

  One very rare opportunity to prove the genius she loved wrong.

  Anne-Marie felt the faintest of smiles cross her face as she looked out at the willow tree shivering in the breeze. Samuel, the gardener, had told her that the willow was one of the nine so-called sacred trees mentioned in Wicca, the pagan religion of witchcraft. He explained that the willow had several magical uses and played a role in guiding the dead to The Summerland, the Wiccan term for the afterlife.

  Anne-Marie had been both surprised and fascinated by the old man’s knowledge. ‘How do you know these things?’ She had asked immediately. ‘Are you a follower of…’ she hesitated, searching for a word that sounded right, ‘…of Wicca?’

  Samuel had grimaced. ‘No, Miss Wells. I’m not one for following man-made traditions about such stuff. I’ve worked the soil all my life. Nature doesn’t have any rituals the way people seem to need them. Seems to me she’s too busy getting on with the process of living to have time for anything else.’

  Getting on with the process of living…

  Anne-Marie turned away from the window and looked at the clock on the wall. It was 12.10. She would have to leave very soon. The appointment was at 12.45. Her right hand was unconsciously hovering over her lower stomach. Her photos – the ones that had made her rich and famous – captured images of things that happened beyond and around her. Today she would get the results of some very different images; images that showed what was within. Her right hand began to tremble and she moved it away from her stomach, picking up the white coffee mug from the table and placing it by the sink. Just shifting things around. Everyday stuff. The process of living.

  Now Anne-Marie longed for the emptiness in her stomach that had once signaled that a creative and exciting journey lay ahead. Now her stomach was knotted and tight; gripping hard, pulling in around itself like a castle surrounded by enemies, refusing to allow easy access, seemingly impenetrable in its grim determination. Only her fear was that her stomach was too late, that the enemy had already taken hold within.

  She would know soon enough. The pictures had been taken. Perhaps these images would speak the truth.

  Anne-Marie left the kitchen and went to the bathroom one last time. Then she put on her Kenneth Cole quilted coat, protection against the increasing winter chill, and keyed in the burglar alarm. She picked up an umbrella from the stand by the front door and walked out of the house, locking the door behind her. She put her keys into the simple, red Radley shoulder bag that contained nothing else apart from her iPhone, turned her back on the willow tree and walked out of the garden.

  She left her camera at home.

  18.

  They will have found the body by now. The wheels will be in motion. The great process of detecting. The systems, the teams, the procedures. The well-oiled machine, greased and spurred by my first public connection.

  I wanted it to start on a day like today. The rain is symbolic. It represents a system of transformation. Just as my action does.

  There will be fall out.

  Only rain cannot choose to create itself. It forms because of the conditions. It falls because the height of the clouds and the prevailing temperature determines that it should be rain and not snow or hail. Rain is the product of a system. It is one part of an ongoing, cyclic recurrence. Air rising, changing, returning. From the earth to the heavens, bringing back hope. Salvation, even.

  Here, when it rains all people can do as they rush from place to place is keep their heads down against it. Unwilling to look up in case reality pierces their eyes.

  So blind. So lost in their lonely, disconnected worlds.

  Imprisoned.

  Within themselves.

  On the other side of the planet people who understand drought know better. They look up to the skies desperate for the first sign of clouds. They know what it means to live in a barren wilderness. They know how it feels to be truly parched. Yet still they understand their connection to it all. They welcome the rain for what it is.

  The Great Nourisher.

  When I look at the rain I see more than anyone else ever could. I see every colour of the rainbow. I see connections.

  We are all born connected. More so than we ever imagine – and far more than most people ever think.

  There was a time when we all knew this. It was the time before we created the language of separation.

  Have you ever considered that fact, that ours is the language of separation? Do you realise the tragedy of this? Do you acknowledge the part you play in it?

  Language, like the rain, was meant to connect us. Only as you built your vocabulary, much as you built your societies, increasingly more complex and insular and distinct, you lost the ability to look and listen.

  Now, in our so-called Communication Age, you stare into a screen with intensity, you learn the intricacies of the latest technology so that you can send meaningless platitudes to people you call your friends and yet have never even met. This is where you choose to focus, living in a world that has no substance, giving those real people – including those you say you love – nothing more than a casual glance.

  How many can truly stand within a crowd and see who is around them? How many even try?

  The fact that I can – the fact that I do – means that I influence with ease. I choose how to make people behave, to make the associations I want them to, when I want them to.

  I can see inside you.

  I will re-establish our primal connection.

  I will influence you in ways you cannot even imagine.

  I promise.

  PART TWO

  Looking

  19.

  Marcus Kline knew how to look.

  He knew how to really look. He had trained himself – continued to train himself – how to see with clarity, how to achieve insight.

  From his perspective the vast majority of the population lived their lives either blind or blinkered. No matter how significant the scene in front of them, the best that most people could achieve was a casual glance. That, Marcus believed, was one of the primary reasons why society was littered with miscommunication and misunderstanding. It was why so many people couldn’t even recognise how their own partners were feeling most of the time, why teachers and healers caused such unintended harm, why strangers populated the world.

  As a young man Marcus Kline realised he had an innate talent to, quite literally, capture images in the blink of an eye. He had discovered that if his mind was empty of thoughts and if he then looked at a subject swiftly, briefly, then blinked before instantly turning his gaze elsewhere, the image stayed in his
mind as clear and detailed as a photograph. The mental image was as permanent as that captured in an album or saved on a phone. Not only that, whenever Marcus revisited the image he could see more than just the shapes, the faces, the colours or the detail.

  He could see below the surface.

  He could see the thoughts in a person’s mind, the emotion they were trying to hide, the motive they kept secret, the fear they denied. And it had led him to the realisation that the word insight offered a literal representation of the ability to really see. For whenever Marcus really looked he saw what was inside his subject. He actually got under their skin. It was a skill that enabled him to select and direct his communication in ways that no one else could.

  Although he had been born with a natural insight Marcus had, over the years, developed a very deliberate training regime to develop it further. He had done so because of a very simple revelation. It was simple and yet of enormous significance. It was simple and yet beyond the scope of everyone else he had ever met.

  It was simply this: people speak, think, and converse in response to a stimulus. That stimulus is usually something they see or hear. It followed therefore, that before a person could have any chance of saying the right thing, of using the right words in any given situation, they needed to be able to see and hear with absolute clarity and precision. Marcus determined that in order to become the world’s greatest communicator, he would first need to develop his senses to an even higher level than they naturally were. Only then would he address the use of language in all its many forms.

  He had begun by placing an everyday object – the first had been a silver pencil sharpener – on a desk in front of him and simply looking at it. His practise had been to empty his mind and sit, in silence, looking at the sharpener for five minutes at a time, three times every day. His starting point had been to forget everything that he knew about the object. He had found this surprisingly easy. His aim was to see it as if for the first time, every time.