Revolution (8 page)

"I
thought I’d married a beautiful woman," the father said with a sigh.
"But what I really ended up marrying was a corpse. She was functional as a
wife, I’ll admit that. But she was a corpse all the same. I got about as close
to her as you could to a thing sealed in a box of Mylar. I could see her face,
I could see her body. I could even touch it when I needed to. But there was
always that thing between her and me; an invisible sheet that never allowed for
any real connection between us.

"Even
when I slapped her it was as if the flesh of my hand never met the flesh of her
face. She would just stand there as if nothing more had happened than she’d
heard a sudden startling noise."

He looked at
me over his shoulder with a mock look of hurt stretching his mouth thin.
"Please, don’t get sentimental on me about this. As a man you know these
things about women."

At that point
I wanted to walk out of there.

"Anyway,"
he went on, "she gave as good as she got. But it’s better to give than to
receive. Isn’t that what the wise men say? But receiving was not good enough
for her. I would give, she would take, and she would throw it right back at my
face. Very Teutonic of the lady, but she’s quite insane."

"I’m
surprised," I said.

But it didn’t
have the effect on him that I was hoping for.

"The
funny thing was," he said tilting back on his heels and stretching his
back, "I never felt a damn thing whenever she did strike me back. But it
grew annoying after a while. I almost had to break her wrist the last time she
retaliated. But it didn’t stop her trying again and again, futile as it was.
That’s why I threw her out on the street."

He walked
over and tapped the ashes out of his pipe into a cut glass ashtray, the kind of
ashtray that better served in a museum of the Bad of Ways in the Bad Old Days.

He took his
time re-stuffing his pipe with tobacco before jamming it back in his mouth. He
picked up a box of Bengal matches from the tiled mantelpiece, and took one out
like it was the last one left in the world. After he stuck it he sucked its
dense-red flame deep into the pipe bowl as he walked up to the bay window and
puffed smoke at the stained net curtains.

He still had
his back to me when he said it in a big cloud of grey.

"That
thing was not my son," he said.

"Oh?"

He turned to
me with the pipe clenched between his big white teeth and grinned.

"It
didn’t even look like me."

Now the son
is an
it
; a missing dead
it
.

He could have
fooled me that he wasn’t the father of it. Then again the non-father father’s
beard and horn-rimmed spectacles did a pretty good job of smudging the
similarities between them. His brow looked the same as his son’s, as did his
hollow cheeks. Cheeks so hollow I thought he had no back teeth. But he did. And
they were great big molars. I saw them when he yawned out his reminisces of
domestic violence.

No wonder she
was divorcing the creep.

"Son,"
he said, "that woman was pregnant when I married her. I didn’t know about
it until after the wedding. But I brought him up to be mine. I tried to love
the little bastard as if he was mine. But she loved him like he wasn’t."

God did he
look stick thin compared to men his age.

That’s all I
could think about when he prompted me one last time.

"You do
understand me don’t you?" he asked.

No I did not.

"Sure,"
I said with my arms flying up and flopping down again. "What’s not to
understand?"

Like
everything.

#

"Your
son had a problem?" I asked the mother.

"Yes,"
she said.

"Care to
tell me about it?"

"You
know what it means," she said.

"Which
kind of problem are we talking about?"

"Emotion
mediated," she said walking away to a tallboy in the corner.

She opened
the second drawer and pulled out big sheets of paper.

Not the usual
amateur green for grass and blue for sky I noticed. But there was something
about the colors that nearly sucked the eyes out of my skull. Their effect was
even worse than the miniatures he’d drawn in his notebook.

They didn’t
have the same effect on her though.

And she saw
the way I looked at them.

"You can
see, can’t you?" she said a little too close. I thought I was going to end
up with her tongue in my ear.

When I turned
to face her she jerked her head back so fast that I thought it would break her
neck.

"Kind
of," I said.

I reached into
my inside pocket for my Polaroid sunglasses. Those colors were really getting
to me. I had to blink just to tear my eyes away from them.

In the end,
sunglasses or not, I had to keep my eyes shut until I heard the scrape of paper
on paper and the drawer close before I dared open them again.

I looked at
her.

"It’s a
neurological phenomenon," I said rubbing my eyes behind my shades.

"You
don’t believe that any more than I do," she said.

My oh my how
the mother’s tone dropped when she wasn’t hearing what she wanted to hear.

"That’s
what they call it," I said hooking a leg of my shades with my little
finger and peeling them away from my face.

"I don’t
care what fancy names they call it," she said with a bitterness that
quinine would have been proud of. "What my son could see wasn’t just
inside his head."

"And
this is why you contacted me?"

She blinked
in surprise.

"I
thought that with you having the same condition you would be able to
help."

She was all
exasperation.

I shrugged.
I’d changed my mind. I wanted to walk out, go away, change my number again, my
address, my name, to be an island, to get lost, to live my life on a different
carousel.

"Will
you help me?" she asked.

"Your
son died, suddenly and young, that’s…"

"A
tragedy, yes," she cut me off. "I don’t need reminding. I’m the
grieving mother who can’t believe her son died for nothing. The police think
I’m mad, and worse, a pest. My husband is the same. No one understands me. I
thought at least you would."

She was
verging on rage, but still not a tear in sight.

And when the
fairness of her skin flooded with volcanic red it did not a good mix make,
especially when it was topped by her plutonium blonde hair that had been yanked
back so tight with a genuine tortoiseshell clamp that it gave her a permanent
face lift.

I slumped
down on a stool at the kitchen table.

She made
coffee; the real kind, loaded and effective.

She sat down
opposite me and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. But I could see she was
dying to.

She put her
cup down as though it was from the Ming Dynasty.

"Tell me
about it," I said.

"He
called it the Columbus Machine," she said. "At least that’s what my
son said he was drawing."

"I meant
the neurologist’s findings," I said.

She sighed,
composed herself, sat up straight on her perch and focused her eyes on
something behind me.

Suddenly I
could smell brick dust, tritium trickling through lead pipes and burning metal.
I looked over my shoulder. But the only thing that caught my eye was an atrium,
stuffed with dead cacti hanging on the wall. The mirror at the back of it
reflected the window behind her. A fuzzy orange light blending with violet
filled its frame. I snapped my head back around. But there was nothing to see
but sunlight flickering through the leaves of a poison ivy trying to claw its
way into sanctuary over the edge of the sill.

"The
doctor didn’t know," she said. "No one did. And my son wouldn’t talk
about it too much. Not at all as he grew older. Just those damn drawings. Even
then he would hide them from us."

"Where
does his problem come into all of this?" I asked.

"The
doctor, the neurologist, talked to him like you talk to any ten-year-old child,
by humoring him. My son told the doctor that he, the neurologist, was glowing.
That was the first we knew anything about it. ‘A glow,’ my son said. ‘What
color is it?’ the doctor asked. ‘Violet,’ my son said. Didn’t everyone see it?
‘No,’ the doctor said looking at me then at his father. It was as if he was
accusing us of having done something bad to our own son; poisoned or brainwashed
him. It felt as if we were on trial. But my son said that the doctor glowed,
the nurses glowed, his father and I, everyone and everything glowed.

""Some
epileptics see a glow before they have a seizure," the doctor told us
later. Some smell things too. My son had mentioned odors that weren’t there,
like burning pine or creosote. But they ruled out epilepsy. We knew that after
they wired up his brain to a machine. He had no abnormal waves."

I could feel
bad memories crawling under my skin.

"Are you
sure he wasn’t sleepwalking when he had these funny turns?" I asked.

"My son
never walked in his sleep in his life," she said as if I’d slapped her in
the face.

"One
thing that we did notice," she said, "was that he would paint, draw
those things afterwards and, well, you’ve seen the results of that. I loved
him. But my son couldn’t draw a thing to save himself, except after one of his
episodes."

I stared down
at my cup. There was nothing but dregs left.

"More
coffee?" she asked standing clutching her own cup between her hands.

I shook my
head. "No."

"Do you
know what he was going through?" she asked pouring more coffee for
herself.

"Yes."

I stared down
at my cup again. The dregs had turned into a Maltese cross.

"Are
they the same symptoms as yours?" she asked walking back.

"Similar,"
I said, "the glows, the sleep thing, the shakes, the light flares, seeing
things that aren’t really there, the rainbow dreams."

"Someone
was after him," she said sitting down again, poised, cup between her long
fingers and sipping genteelly. Her eyelashes flapped at me over the rim.

I jerked up
my head.

"He told
you that?" I asked.

"He was
convinced there was," she said putting her cup down more carefully than
before, precisely into the dented ring of her saucer.

The eagle had
landed on a sea of tranquility.

And I felt
sick at a stranger’s memory.

#

I left with
my hat in my hand.

I locked up,
sailed the waves to Cuxhaven and trained it to Harburg-Hamburg.

Everyone
spoke English at a push and I felt like the dumb tourist.

I set myself
up for six days and nights at the son’s last hotel, der Janus. After that it
was uphill all the way down.

I flicked
through his notebook: the dates, the times, the places he’d been, the bars.
There were lots of them. And that’s all they were--dates, times, places--but
there was no key as to why he had written them down in the first place.

I opened the
map and drew a red lines around the streets he’d written down, and the dates
that he’d visited each one, and stepped back. I was looking at a zigzag in a circle
that turned out to be an eight-point star. Four of the lines crossed from one
star point to the one opposite. The last date and place he’d written down was
dead center. After that, the son was no more.

It was time.

I drank an
absinthe-vodka double, no ice, and made my way down to the outside world. It
was like walking into the heat of a tomb.

The street
was narrow enough to be mistaken for a rattrap.

The shop
front lights blinked out as I walked by.

Most of the
streetlights didn’t work and those that did didn’t help me to see further than
the next recessed doorway.

And the
streetlights that did work hung like little green flying saucers hovering over
the tramlines.

Live wires
crisscrossed the road from one side to the other like electrified barbed wire
that twanged with an electric-blue flash every once in a while. But a tram
never came trundling along the rails.

From daylight
to dark the area of St. Georg had changed entirely. It was like walking onto a
film set. Things looked real but felt more like artifice with my walk further
into the dark.

Damned
absinthe; I should have known better.

Shadows oozed
in and out of doorways. The place was crawling at the seams.

Cops came and
went in silence and picked up shadows here and there. The shadows didn’t put up
any kind of resistance and the cops and the perps, for whatever they had done,
left in a red trail of rear lights disappearing into nothing.