The Teacher

My dear Tombshard,

After my disheartening experience yesterday, I did indeed decide to make the rounds. One in my position has to remember not to get caught up solely in one family’s story, and in particular the sordid soap opera of emotional and uneven children. Their short-term view is delightful, but at the same time it is a very short view which can make more habitual corruption difficult. Older patients are very good Index Patients as well. Reminded of this, I decided today to spend my time with our first long-shot candidate, the teacher named Finnegan. I took Saltslug and a few of his more promising interns, and sent our excellent spy Alikan to monitor the Zero-A father at work.

School is not in session right now, of course. Her primary job does not begin until this fall. We followed her during the normal course of the summer day.

Saltslug and I were both impressed once again with how much a human being can come to be dominated by the corruption of evil, and yet be so utterly blind to it. At the same time we could also present our interns with an object lesson on how the corruption of evil and its resulting Isolation can work against us, by denying us viral Access to the relationally connected humans.

I almost feel sorry those responsible for the Finnegan portfolio. They clearly took a very risk-averse approach to this Case. They are rather like the fearful servant in the Enemy’s story: they worked so hard to ensure Finnegan was kept in our camp that they failed in any admittedly higher-risk play for those related to her. As a result the Finnegan portfolio is very thin indeed. They might have been feasting on ten souls, or even a hundred—but instead they have just this one, bitter old woman.

This is the tricky play I constantly strive to pass on to my interns, one I learned from Screwtape during his tenure as head of the College. Yes, you can Isolate a patient from all possible contact with the Enemy by planting distrust, bitterness, cynicism—all of these anti-social seeds. But by doing so, you also burn any bridge over which you might have Access to others, and plant seeds in them. On the other hand, you can make the play of encouraging selfish relationships on the part of the patient. It is a risk because, of course, Access is a two-way street: your own Patient might encounter resurrection life that destroys your work. But if you’ve got the guts and the skill you can end up not with one course at the Table, but many.

It seems to me that the best method is a light relational connection—enough so the patient’s corruption passes easily through the atmosphere to others, but tenuous enough that most with resurrection power find it easier to back away from a black cloud than to try to invade it with light. Make it a seemingly far more formidable task to lift the blackness than in truth you know it to be, so the less experienced will turn away from the challenge, thinking it beyond them. Smoke and mirrors and illusion are the name of the game here: the ideal is a highly sociable person who seems friendly and outgoing and yet constantly passes on seeds of corruption, who puts up a great front that no one will want to pass beyond while spewing the sweetest poison everywhere.

Finnegan, on the other hand, is too far gone to be of use to us to infect the Enemy’s camp directly. No matter that the Enemy ate and drank with sinners; his followers today do not tend to do this. They don’t smoke, and they don’t chew, and they don’t run with those who do: indeed they run far the other direction. Finnegan’s overt sins have caused those with Life to Isolate her lest she infect them; and she, in turn, has become so bitter at being left out and ignored that she has Isolated herself from anyone and everyone who might unselfishly love her. I am uncertain that any relationships beyond work and the bare minimum of social connections could be reactivated without a major shift in her heart and mind, and such a shift would be a very high stakes play indeed—one to be avoided except at the last resort.

It may be that we at least can make use of her constant black depression to likewise infect others, but perhaps with a lighter version, a dourness, a put-upon grumpiness, a self-centered bad mood, that could be useful. We will see when the school year begins. Until then there is hardly any use in pursuing this portfolio further. To try to expose her to any friendships might undo all the… diligent work that her Case Officers have put in, and I would so hate to undo the fruits of their labor!

Yours affectionately,
Greystone