Revolution (10 page)

No money in
the account the machine said. Easily fixed, I thought. I touched the screen and
a flare of green changed all that. All cash with no questions asked and the
visible man was invisible once more.

I was the
twist in their fate, the bend in their time.

Our parents
had put my brothers and I through first to see what happened rather than risk
their own lives.

So I’m stuck,
forever a stranger, wondering how long it will take this place, this time, to
realize that I will never register as someone alive long enough to ever be
dead.

It was early morning,
March 15th, 1964, in a place called the Station Bar, a place that sold nothing
stronger than ground coffee.

The interior
was dark, its décor browned from years of cigarette smoke and the lighting
thankfully weak.

The mezzanine
was suspended in shadow and heavily guarded behind wrought iron railings, and
behind those railings stood pinball machines hidden in corners of twilight.

Their lights
twinkled and pulsed, but there were no sounds.

A locked gate
barred this stairway to the light and dark as the door to the street opened and
closed and a stranger stepped in from the cold.

From a far
corner an insipid ghost oozed from grey to white and shuffled towards the
stranger.

The ghost
waddled in a gelid swaying motion as if ungluing itself from its own shadow.

The ghost was
a man, the owner, a graceless fat swan dying on his feet.

In his grubby
apron he asked the stranger if he would like coffee, for that was the only
thing anyone ever seemed to ask for at this time of the morning.

The owner's
bald head bent in supplication.

His podgy hands
worried together, crushing into one another in restrained glee, or perhaps
relief, that a customer had actually turned up and sat down.

His smile
pushed through a doughy face, a sign of working in the dark too long.

The stranger
sat down at the table, his eyes still hidden beneath the wide brim of his hat.

Above them
translucent light globes, always on night or day, were furred in dust and filth
and hung high on chains with their brown fabric cables twisted around them.

The stranger
nodded, yes, he would have coffee.

The owner
shuffled away on thin heels over red, near black with grime, linoleum worn in
patches here and there, like islands showing through a bed of dried blood.

Chill filled
the air and yet the doors were closed to the street.

The windows
had been painted shut years ago, the glass they were made of splattered with
months of grime.

Closed they
might have been but that chill still remained to trace thin fingers through the
odor of dead pig meat and brown speckled lard just festering to be reheated for
another day's work, whereupon it would be re-fried and blistered to perfection
and set upon an unsuspecting public.

A black Rover
rolled by outside, then a Morris Minor.

And the
stranger watched them through the walls as easily as if they were made of
broken glass and shrouds of ancient muslin.

Two in a row,
he thought, very unusual.

He took off
his hat and placed it on the tabletop.

He pushed it
around the salt and pepper pots, then the sugar bowl as he set it skating over
the red Formica.

Bored with
that he rested his hands on the table itself.

Feeling its
coolness he traced his fingers around the chipped edge searching for a catalyst
in a drop of moisture, of coffee, of tea, or the residue of dried sweat from
fingertips or blood if he was lucky.

Then he found
what he was looking for as his fingers rested on a particular spot for he heard
the fluttering of a bat's wing in Burma.

He saw dead
men, dead soldiers and boys trapped and killed in a far off land, illiterate
lads who knew nothing of the wardrobe or the witch, and too busy surviving on
the streets for such niceties for a lion in Narnia. For these boys had been
cannon pulped in the patriotic fervor for war they never understood.

Invisible
lands woven from the Sunday pulpit, a darkened dream into young patriotic minds
with the promise to make heroes, a lie that had been forced upon them to grow
up too fast and to die too soon in swamps of blood and political prestige.

The stranger
leaned back and reached into his pocket for his pack of Players Plain. He
flipped open the top and looked in at the twin rows of ten on ten, at the
shredded leaves neatly cut through.

He nipped one
by the edge, dragged it out and put it in his mouth. He sucked air through the
white tube of paper and saltpeter then struck a match, pulling the flame into
end to the sound of reveille.

He felt every
one of them in pain, every one of them who had died.

But the worst
pain was from the one who had been betrayed.

That was why
the stranger was here.

And now he
sat waiting as the fat man shuffled back and laid his coffee on the table.

The cup
clinked in its saucer, the sound as grating as fingernails ripped off in the
dark, or scraping down on a concrete pillar, but not worse than a bullet in the
eye, or a seventeen-year-old boy's bravery torn from his guts by a serrated
bayonet in a sticky humid land of leaves and tangled vines.

"They
gave their lives so we may live," the stranger spoke around the cigarette
between his lips.

"Sorry?"
the fat man asked perplexed.

The stranger
looked up.

His blue-grey
glittering eyes stared up at the fat man, blinked then looked away again.

"Strangers
in an even stranger land," the stranger said.

He looked up
again and saw the quizzical look his words had caused on the fat man's face.

"Just
thinking out loud," he said blowing out streamers of smoke wondering what
the hell those boys saw in these things.

"Better
than crying out loud," the fat man said without knowing why he had said
such a thing.

A painful
smile of uncertainty cut through his face, like cheese wire slicing through
unbaked dough, as he rubbed his hands on his grubby apron.

"Anything
else," he asked raising his eyebrows, "something to eat,
perhaps?"

"Geometric
progression," the stranger said.

"Excuse
me?"

"It
moves faster than you think," the strangers said.

He sipped his
coffee.

"Ah,
well, nothing else then," the fat man said.

"Yes,"
the stranger said slowly.

"Yes?"

"Please,"
the stranger said, "Sit down."

The stranger
reached out snaking his fingers around the back of the chair to his right and
pulled it out from the table. Its wooden legs scraped through the ingrained
grime of the flooring.

The fat man
watched and held his hands apart mid way between preach and prayer then found
them suddenly sucked together in a clap.

It made him
cringe inside, the sound, in silence like live flesh slapping on rigor meat.

It wasn't
much of a sound, and no sound at all in a battlefield.

But inside
the cafe, in the dim and the dark of its interior behind the shrouded swaddling
of bricks and grimy glass, it sounded like an explosion.

Jericho's
trumpets the stranger thought and smiled.

"I have
to get back to work," fat man said. "Customers, you know, hungry,
living to make. You know how it is."

The fat man
looked around at the shadows and empty tables at the windows, through the grey
netting blotting out the day. He was searching for salvation at the closed
doors as the sweat oozed from the meat of his brow.

"In
time," the stranger said.

And his hand
rested for a second longer on the back of the chair he had pulled out before he
let it go.

It was a
forced invitation.

The doors of
the cafe shuddered.

Mere
vibrations as things settled into proper focus.

For beyond
them the world had receded and rushed back behind them in a gun metal shadow eclipsing
the sun's rays for long enough and no more, just enough of a flicker for
reality to unhinge

The fat man
looked down at the chair as the stranger clicked his fingers, carapaces of dung
beetle black, on the tabletop.

"Sit,
please," the stranger insisted.

Gravity began
to exceed the fat man's mass, dragging his internal organs lower, tugging them
down inside.

He felt
deflated, the optimum pressure keeping him alive escaping from his withering
veins.

Suddenly the
chair seems an enticing option and he slumped down on it.

"Have
you ever considered calculus?" the stranger asked flicking cigarette ash
into the sugar bowl.

The fat man
watched as the ash glided down too slowly, trapped in a local dilatation of
time.

And he
continued to watch as it was swallowed by the sugar with the sound of a rock
sucked into a pool of congealing blood.

The fat man
shook his head as his jowls gained weight and the bags under his eyes grew
heavy.

"Cut a
sheet of paper half way down," the stranger said. "Then cut what's
left to half way down again, then again, and again and again. How many cuts
does it take to cut the sheet of paper in half?"

The stranger
settled back.

The joints of
his straight backed chair creaked, and he took a long deep drag of his
cigarette as he watched the fat man's eyes water. Not through crying, but
because he could not close them.

The fat man
shook his head as if in a dream.

A thick drop
of yellow serum trickled from his eye and rolled down his sagging cheek.

"Not
even a guess?" the stranger asked unconcerned.

The fat man
shook his head again as his jowls pulled themselves beyond his jaw line and his
neck expanded to accommodate the gathering mass.

"The
answer is never," the stranger said. "Imagine that! You never reach
the end because you are only ever cutting half way of whatever is left. Imagine
that, hmm?"

Fat man's
brow sunk, pulling his hairline lower until it was an inch above where his
watering eyes glimmered in pools of sludge.

"Which
means," the stranger smiled at him, "that what is happening to you
now, won't ever stop. Like your guilt, it will pull you downwards forever. And
I am here to tell you that it will keep on going, even when you are dead."

The
stranger's thin lips pulled tight.

"But you
can get very close to it," he said. "Exponentially ten times ten
times ad
vomitum
until the doctors grow bored with your obvious pain,
which you brought on by yourself anyway, as we shall soon see. And they will
then walk away from you, and they leave you alone in a concrete bunker, because
they don't know how to help you. They will leave you in your own personal
misery of indescribable and eternal agony, throw up their hands, and forget
you. And that's because you will be an embarrassment for their failure to do
anything for you. But not me!" the stranger thrust his face an inch away
from the fat man's. "And that is why you are now trapped in fractal
oblivion. All because of the endless misery and suffering that you caused. And
thought you could get away with it."

The stranger
slumped back in his seat.

"But the
act did not die back there and then," he said. "It only suffered the
cuts endlessly and forever until it cut right back here to you. It is still
here. And I followed to you here, all because you, my man, are the focal point
of an endlessly long pain. Get it?"

The stranger
watched as the fat man sank further inside his own bulk.

"Guilt
always finds a way, you know. You ate and ate hoping to hide your guilt from
everyone. But it doesn't work on me," he said.

He looked
around.

"You
picked the wrong place to start a business," he went on.  "This is
the place they used to bring the dead back to for collection from Burma isn't
it? Some bodies weren't collected at all, of course, and that's because they
had no families before they were packed off to fight a war they were tricked
into. No call collect for them then. Like your friend. He was a friend, wasn't
he?"

The fat man
began to sway, or was it the walls?

Everything
rushed away from him into a grayness that engulfed his entire surroundings.

Stars
appeared and glittered. There was an acceleration of movement inside his head
as the grayness solidified to the sound of rapid gunfire and screams of pain.

Another yell
of agony was cut off in a volley of gunshot.

Heat swamped
in thick and green like blankets of algae and wafting seaweed that found itself
being parboiled close to a river of lava.

The fat man
looked down at his feet, at the corpse lying there, at the headless body, at
the bloody pulp that had once been a boy his own age.

The fat man's
name was Jim, and felt the hot metal of his rifle in his hands, and saw how
thin his arms used to be when they were once swathed in khaki.

#

"They're
gaining on us," Frank said.