Revolution (5 page)

Just
keep the money.

"Yeah,
right."

And
there I was one flight up in the only office space I could afford, inside a
disused paper mill on the edge of town. It was Alcatraz stuck on an island of
dust and scrub bush that stretched out like a moat for miles around, an island
built on iron pilings and shrouded in rusty chains too heavy to swing in a
hurricane.

"I
should have paid her for it, insisted, a token gesture, a transaction of some
kind. "

There
was something in that.

But
something Mrs. Andresen had blocked, her way of stopping the natural flow of
things.

She had
been smart. I'll say that for her. She'd cut the cord that binds, then walked
away like nothing had ever happened.

That
bitch!

Yeah,
well, it had nothing to do with money according to her. And by the look of it
she didn't need it anyway. But what she had done was to break the way of
things, destroyed the road between her and it.

And
she's left you with it, Sean, stuck you with it in your hand in the headlights
of every raving loony, jamming his foot down hard on the gas, coming at you in
an army of khaki-colored ten-ton trucks, jiggling with spent uranium warheads.

"Hey,
stay off my side, will yah?"

Saw-ree.

This
wasn't the way things were supposed to have happened. This hadn't been in the
story when I'd gone over it in my mind, a story that hadn't blurred to hell
copy from copy style as I'd sit there reading her letter, night after night,
over and over again.

Exchanging
the money had been the main thing in it for me, though, minus my cut of course.
I would have felt a sense of right to the picture if she had taken the check, a
real sense of passage of ownership.

Hand it
over, burn it or keep it. Make up your mind for Christ's sake!

"Beat
it!" I screamed at the wall.

I let
the thumping in my veins subside a bit, and calmed my breathing as I stepped
around my desk looking down at that damned envelope innocently lying there.

I pulled
a face at it.

It's
wrong. It's all wrong I tell you.

And
there was something else. If I gave the buyer his money back, along with the
picture, he might think that I was giving him a fake, not the real thing, that
maybe I was holding onto the real one, and keeping it for a higher price.

Whichever
way I looked at it I was stuck with it.

It
started to feel like trying to flick sticky fly paper off my fingers that was
already snaking around my arm.

Don't
look an alien in the mouth.

"Who's
looking?"

Okay, so
I have it now, the photograph, and all is well. I have the final piece of the
jigsaw. I have Orthon in profile, the guy who played a central part in one of
the biggest hoaxes of the twentieth century. Now all I needed to do was publish
the book about the lead up to finding it, and be damned.

Don't
give the guy his money back.

"No!"

Keep it.

"Shit!"

#

The sun
angled through the window behind me.

I turned
in my chair and looked up at the glass, at the grime and the yellowed paper
stuck to it on the outside.

A breeze
flicked the bottom right corner that had peeled away reminding me of a time
when I was a kid when I had watched the wing of a dragonfly caught in a
spider's web.

I'd learned
in close to it, blew on the wing, and the sun had shone through it refracting
all the colors of an oil angel.

I'd
thought the dragonfly was dead, until one of its legs kicked, and a spider
rushed out of nowhere and covered it.

I'd
jumped back, like now, when that thing thumped against the glass, right there
in the corner where the paper flickered in the desert breeze.

I stood
up breathing hard. The skin of my back prickled with a million needles of
nitrogen stabbing into my spine.

I
pressed myself hard against the wall, then slid along it until I could peek out
a corner of the window.

But
there was nothing out there except for the sun going down behind a flat desert
horizon, and shadows from rocks clawing their way across a wasteland towards
the building.

Maybe a
bird had lost its way. Maybe it had seen its own reflection in the glass and
gone on the attack.

And
maybe you're just going nuts.

I pushed
myself away from the wall and stepped out from behind my desk.

It was
too lonely out there and felt about as safe as being stuck on another planet
without a return ticket.

I had to
get away, to go somewhere safe where I could think.

#

When I
got back to the apartment I yanked down the blinds and dropped the envelope on
the coffee table before going for the Wild Turkey, my thinking fluid.

On first
sip the telephone rang.

My skin
prickled cold all over again only this time it gave me an itch that left me
feeling like I was dead meat on bones.

The damn
phone kept ringing.

It had
to be the buyer.

I took a
breath, held it for a second then let it out slowly as I reached for the
receiver.

It
stopped ringing just as I touched it.

Forget
it.

I
flopped down on the sofa, lit up a cigarette, and watched the sun bleed below
the horizon through the slats of the blinds.

Keep the
money and give the guy the graph.

Get rid
of it, Sean.

I
switched on the lamp then reached out, picked up the envelope by the corner as
if it was contaminated, and let the picture bounce onto the table.

Only now
there was something wrong with it.

I slid
off of the sofa and hunkered down on my knees, peered across the table top, and
I swear to God that the emulsion had blown.

The
front of the picture was beveled.

It had
gone from flat to three D where a dirty line had traced around the guy's head.
It was like the image was trying to burn its way into the room.

I sat
back on my haunches. I didn't know what to do, except I didn't want to touch
the thing now.

I
slugged back on bourbon, chewed on ice, then dragged the back of my hand over
my mouth.

I
thought it was blood.

But when
I looked in close I couldn't see right. So I shuffled over to the lamp for a
better look and held my hand under the light.

There
was a red smear all over my knuckles.

I stood
up and staggered into the bathroom.

The
over-light hissed and clicked as I stepped up to the cabinet and edged my way
in front of the rusted mirror.

Don't
look at the eyes, Sean.

I
remember thinking that, just don't look at the eyes.

But I
didn't get a chance because that's when there was a thump at the front door.

The
apartment was such a cheap dump I didn't even bother with security much. I
didn't add chains and bars across the door. There was no point.

I had
nothing to steal. A burglar would have been doing me an insurance favor.

And
burglars don't pound at the door.

I dived
for the floor like a brick had been lobbed at my back.

"Open
up!" the guy shouted.

I
scrambled into the front room on my hands and knees and grabbed the photograph
just as the bullet ricocheted off the lock and embedded itself in the floor two
inches away from my hand.

After
that it was pure instinct.

I'm
surprised I remembered my jacket, never mind my wallet, as I scrambled out the
kitchen window.

I guess
I should have remembered the letter. Without that they have had nothing on me.
And maybe that was why she had made such a fuss about me destroying it. Who
knows?

And
maybe she was already dead because of it.

#

After
that I lived with rats and cockroaches behind dumpsters in backstreets for
three months until even the homeless guys grew suspicious of me.

To tell
the truth I didn't trust them either. Any one of them could have been in
disguise, keeping watch.

And I
still couldn't bring myself to get rid of the picture. If they caught me with
it I was a dead man. If they caught me without it I was a dead man.

So I did
the next best thing.

I
vanished completely.

I
changed bank accounts, changed my name, bought a new passport and made my way
around the world.

What I
didn't realize was how cold a desert gets in the middle of the night.

All I
remember is sitting with my back against a rock and that I hadn't eaten
anything in days.

I was so
numb I couldn't even feel pain.

#

"So
I had to run. You see that don't you? I had to get away."

"What
happened to it?" the doctor asked.

"He
took it from me."

"Who?"

"Orthon."

"The
spaceman?"

"Yes."

"What
were you doing out in the middle of the Californian desert anyway?" he
asked scribbling notes on a yellow pad.

"I
was heading for Desert Center," I said.

"Why?"
he asked peering at me over half-moon specs.

"Guess,"
I said.

"I'm
all out of guess work," he said, hunched over back at his notes again.

"I
was going for a walk," I said.

"You
were lucky," he said leaning back. "Another few hours and you would
have died of hypothermia."

His belt
was having a hard time holding back his gut. The buttons on his shirt weren't
doing too well either. And every time he shifted his weight his chair creaked
like one of its legs was about to snap.

"You're
the doc," I said. "You would know."

He raised
one grey eyebrow then shrugged his arms up and down inside his jacket. It was
like his shoulders were balloons trying to blow up inside a bag.

And that
bag just wasn't big enough.

"I
did my stint at medical school," he said. "Even psychiatrists like me
have to go through that shit first."

"Really?"
he said.

"Really,"
repeated Doc Parrot all beak and no mouth.

"Anyway,"
he went on, "there's been an application for your extradition. It seems
that you stole a lot of money."

Yeah,
really? I wanted to say, but I could see this was going nowhere. At least
nowhere I wanted to go.

"I
wasn't stealing it," I said. "I was using it."

I
twisted back around and sat facing him full on with my arms on the table.

"So
what's the difference?" he yawned.

Pencil
like a flagpole he poked it up and down in the air a few times without looking
at me.

"Go
on," he said. "My ears might have turned to cloth with this cock and
bull crap, but I'm paid to listen."

The guy
in the corner just stood there. I couldn't see his eyes for his Pergolides, but
I could see he had a good strong pulse in his neck. For a second I wondered if
I could jump across the table fast enough to grab the docks neck and strangle
his fat neck before I was gunned down.

"Look,"
I said. "He didn't want the money. She didn't want the money..." but
it was just another pointless waste of words from my side.

"Either
way it belongs to him or her, but not you," the doc said. "So why did
you take it?"

"I've
told you!"

Too
sharp.

I rubbed
the back of my neck and smeared the sweat through the stubble of the razor cut
they'd given me (procedure – lice or ticks, lime disease, quarantine, green
money virus, whatever. They threw everything at me at the same time they threw
me under the ice-cold Dieldrin shower).

The doc
sighed like he'd had enough

"A
lunatic story about fly saucers," he read from his notes, "and a
spaceman from the fifties. Am I right?"

I think
that was the first time I saw something like a half-smile sneering up the side
of his no-lip face.

"I
thought you were a psychiatrist," I said.

I leant
back like I couldn't care and bit a ring of crenulations with an incisor around
the rim of my empty coffee carton.

"I
am. And lunatics still exist," he said, pen scribbling, head shaking (tut
tut tut I don't know) as his eyebrows scaled the heights of his forehead for
that intellectual bagged fog for brain inside that head of his. "And no
matter what kind of fairytale definitions we give to you poor deluded people,
even in this enlightened day and age, you are still nutcases. So... about this
flying saucer."