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"...he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal."—Louise Gluck , “The Triumph of Achilles”
I. What They Have
“John? What are you doing? “
“Nothing, nothing,...go back to sleep; think about the elements awhile, all right?”
Sherlock has: a fever of 39 degrees, a probable fractured scaphoid bone, a possible concussion, and a wicked post-case hangover, but no death wish, no; the future used to seem irrelevant, but six months and that particular longing for the inorganic had gone; it’s long gone now.
“Here if you need me,” John says, (weary, redundant, because I love you, you stupid, stupid bastard; it hardly needs saying.)
Well. It’s not the first time John’s made him call to mind the first law of thermodynamics (continual presence, of mass, of energy, of closed systems), and it will hardly be the last.
***
John has: a wicked (existential) thirst, a bruise shaped like a gun butt, a taste for scenes that fire the sympathetic nerves, but no god complex; no, he never has, he’s not that kind of doctor, not that kind of soldier, but he’s always looked both ways, you know, for more of a whirlwind than himself.
Before they ran across him on a case, John had already met Janus, the two-faced god, but now he knows why the ancients always invoked him first: oh master of the bivalent, of systems of two, of doorways, of bridges, of time, and beginnings.
II . What They Believe
What people will say to one another in slit trenches, in firefights, in a swimming pool full of fox-faced death; what people will say if it’s the last night, the last moment, the roof’s edge—or not.
They might yet live to try again.
Sherlock believes in a higher power but it’s not (as someone told him once), himself; the self is a cipher after all, the best disguise the philosophers have; no, he believes in knowledge, in science, in facts, in observation, and now, in the fact that it’s fine; it’s fine, to love a defect as yourself.
He might yet discover what others have invented.
John believes in duty, in service, in sacrifice, in dying for love (for chrissakes), in some other very noble things, and now, in the fact that the impossible, when it remains, might still become the improbable truth.
He’s always been able to look both ways.
That’s why,for all the time Sherlock was gone, he could keep to his oath, the good one, the one that matters, that he could say, well, by Apollo the Physician and by Asclepius and by Hygeia and by Panacea and by all the gods, while he waited, while he hoped, for all that time, I still believe in the eternity of the body and the miracle of birth.