One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  We waited for Travis out by the desk, holding Stratten between us. He was conscious, and awake, but in no real state to put up a fight. A big memory dump will do that to you, especially if it’s your first time.

  When Travis emerged he just looked at us silently, then beckoned us forward. I found myself in the interview room for the third time in as many days. It seemed like a hell of a lot longer, and this time it looked different. Less like a cage.

  ‘And this would be?’ Travis asked, when the door was shut.

  ‘Stratten,’ I said.

  ‘Is he all right? He looks ill.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘He’s fine. Just got rather a lot to come to terms with.’

  Travis leaned back against the table, folded his arms. ‘You know I still don’t have enough evidence to tie the blackmail racket to him. There’s nothing which connects him except your word.’

  ‘Romer could have connected him,’ Deck said. ‘Except he’s dead.’

  Travis didn’t look especially surprised. Just made a note of where the body was. ‘Still nothing that’s going to impress the DA,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Hap.’

  ‘I’m not trying to solve the blackmail for you,’ I told him. ‘You’re the cop, you sort that out.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I have reason to believe that this man remembers the murder of a Los Angeles police officer.’

  Travis stared at Stratten: ‘He killed Ray Hammond?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say,’ I said. ‘But he’s got it in his head.’

  Travis didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at me, worked it out. Then he nodded. ‘I can believe that. He looks the type.’

  ‘Marvellous thing,’ I observed to Deck, ‘that kind of investigative intuition.’

  Deck nodded. ‘It impresses the hell out of me.’

  Travis took Stratten’s arm, and Deck and I took a step back.

  ‘It’s after eleven,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Travis said slowly, ‘and you know what? Something weird has happened. I was sure I had a file on my desk, full of things I was going to tidy up, old cases and such, and right now I just can’t find it.’

  My heart tightened. ‘But you will?’

  ‘Difficult to say. You know how it is with things. Sometimes they disappear for good, sometimes they come back.’

  ‘Travis…’

  ‘Go home,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Wherever that may be. Leave the number at the desk. I’ll have a good look through my office, once I’ve booked Stratten, and I’ll let you know what I find.’

  I left Deck’s number, and then he and I went out to a bar and had many beers.

  Next morning Travis called pretty early. I guess he felt it had hung over me long enough. He’d turned his office upside down by then, and just couldn’t put his hand on that damn file. He sounded pretty chipper in spite of that: sodium verithal and a memory scan put Stratten squarely at the scene of Hammond’s murder. There remained the question of why Stratten appeared to have been wearing a woman’s coat in the memory, and why Hammond had referred to him as Laura, but Travis and the DA felt that Stratten’s private life was his own affair. They were both satisfied that justice was being done, in one way or another.

  As for the Transvirtual job, well, without that additional evidence there just wasn’t a case to prosecute. Travis had marked it closed, and it would remain on the database that way. Instead of splitting the bill, the lieutenant had let Ricardo pay for it all.

  Travis was about to put the phone down, ready to go off and happily do cop things, when I found myself saying something. I wondered aloud whether maybe sometime a former criminal, now going straight, could buy him a beer.

  Travis thought for a moment. ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘And certainly not in Irish Ben’s next Friday around nine.’

  Later that afternoon I discovered that nuking Quat’s—well, Stratten’s—website had done something I hadn’t anticipated. The crabdaddy had eaten Quat’s fake accounts, and Vent recaptured it before digestion was complete. I still lost most of my money, through irrecoverable virtual streams which had died when the site went down, but I got back enough to live on for a while. Vent got what I owed him, plus his punitive rate of interest, and I had enough to pay somebody to remove my crime from the database again.

  But I didn’t do it, and I don’t think I will. Bad things happen. Sometimes you do them, sometimes they’re done to you. Claiming they never took place doesn’t solve anything, and it won’t make them go away. No matter how deeply you hide something in the trash, it’s still down there, and it’s still a part of you. Once you’ve read a letter which breaks your heart, burning it doesn’t help. So you call a truce. You stop turning the knife in the night, and try to stop letting it ruin your day. Waiting for perfection is merely a way of turning your back on reality, placing a higher value on what’s inside your head than what is evident all around you. Though where we live may be based on shadows, it is our home: and the battered furniture and hand prints near the light switches are what make it so.

  The invisibles played and tampered for a long time, floating through the lives of the cousins they now regarded as damaged strangers. We had done it to ourselves, and were now doomed to forever miss the point. Sometimes a human would accidentally wander into memory, and see how things really were, but no-one could remember what the vision had been like, and so they made up stories to fill the empty spaces. As soon as you turn back, like Orpheus, you lose what you went there to find. You can’t write with black on black—so you pick up the white brush and do your best, and the very first mark you make will be wrong.

  In time, one of the angels came to believe that the invisible and visible could be brought together again. He tried to hint at the ways things could be.

  But he was too late. The human need to literalize had extended beyond the real world and into the realm of ideas. The operating system had adapted to fit the new hardware, and we needed now to codify everything, to make it rigid. We took what the angel said and painted it in different colours until the picture he’d given back to us no longer made any sense. We elevated one invisible above the others, made him father and king, and called him God.

  The angel banned representations of himself, or even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization—but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation run by young turks who wouldn’t respect the line management structure: they rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn’t realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the minds of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects’ qualities—both profound and trivial. The invisibles were simply not bound by gravity, for example, but we decided that if they could fly then the angels must have wings. And thus it became so, much to the invisibles’ annoyance. Wings were, it transpires, a total pain in the ass—and really tiring to use. They don’t need spaceships either, and the lights in the sky are just something we see in our heads. Each one of us is alien to somebody: the invisibles are just a little more so than most.

  And finally God succumbed to our greatest distinction, that between good and evil. Good deeds have always been done for bad reasons, mistakes made with the best of intentions, but we separated the moral heart from the action, and evil from good, and one side of God from another. We split His mind, and broke His heart.

  God was lost in darkness for a while—torn between visibility and invisibility, between the worlds of angels and of men. He no longer understood himself, and faded into the universal for a time. Some of the other invisibles took advantage of his absence and rebelled against the situation, largely out of pique. They tried to set up opposing power blocs, but before long they tired of the sport. Like humans, angels don’t know how the universe came about. And all God ever wanted was a better relationship be
tween our two kinds. There is beauty in the visible, and peace in that which cannot be touched. The invisibles imagined a reality in which the two could live together, and tried to make it so.

  When God returned, he accepted his earlier errors, and the invisibles tried to codify the relationship between the two worlds. Where once it had often been possible for humans to sometimes wander across the line, it was now made much more difficult, and angels were banned from crossing between worlds any more than necessary. Eventually God communicated with a human who had some ability as a medium, in an attempt to reforge the old link. God arranged for this man to be able to do a few tricks (largely involving control over gravity, the transubstantiation of matter, and a brief and flawed triumph over death) so that mankind would be convinced of the reality of the revelations he brought. The message was simple, and designed merely to be planted and then left alone to grow.

  We are part of something much larger.

  To a degree it worked, and the new idea spread like wildfire. But as always, we took it too literally and made our myths. We decided Jesus couldn’t just be some guy, so later generations invented the virgin birth, ignoring the fact that the original Hebrew text of Isaiah used the word ‘almah’, which doesn’t mean a virgin, but merely a young woman. Jesus started to ad lib, and some of his jokes weren’t funny.

  Our world was too heavy to be reorganized around the truth: so we altered the truth to fit. The word got edited and mangled, often in ways which made no sense at all—and so a myriad of accounts and visions were revised into a story that reads like it was script-edited late at night. God never said he created anything at all. We merely took his name and used it for something we’d done to ourselves. Even the account of the birth of Jesus, something that should have been a straightforward fact, combines events from a span of ten years into a single night. Luke would have felt right at home in the Prose Café: he was the first screen-writer, sculpting fiction for the producer-priests. They wanted a good pre-titles sequence, and they got it—but only by making it up. We turned the truth into words, and typed them on top of each other until it was impossible to see what they said.

  The medium got himself whacked in the end, and circumstances conspired to spread a religion throughout the world. The invisibles had set up a franchise, with an outlet in every town—but the product got damaged in transit, and the message emerged misshapen and skewed.

  Worst of all, it captured God and enchained him in words, made him so concrete that he had to live amongst us all the time: the wandering invisible made flesh.

  Laura returned on the evening of the day I had the conversation with God. She found herself in a forest, down by the stream that she’d known as a child, standing on a rock. After a time there she walked back into the city, and ended up at Deck’s door.

  She didn’t remember anything about where she’d been, but something must have happened to her there. She was calmer, seemed better for being away. I wonder whether she chose not to return for those few days, to spend a little extra time in that place where things look different: to examine the start of the circle and try to understand where her life had come from. Sometimes you have to look back: what turns us into pillars of salt is the inability to face forward again.

  She went to Ray Hammond’s house the next day, but there was nobody there. Her mother had gone, I hope to smaller and worse things. There was no rapprochement between Laura and Monica. This is one of life’s realities and truths: you can’t always have said or done the right thing, can’t always have been there for someone, or had them be there for you. There will always have been actions which didn’t take place, emotions which weren’t quite articulated—because past presents look different with the harsh light of retrospect shining up through them. Life isn’t about perfection, but about doing what you can at the time. The way things were was the way they had to be. You have to trust your instincts and forget. The past will always point fingers. That’s what it’s for.

  Laura moved in with Deck a week later, is what happened. I think they were both kind of surprised, and I sure as hell was, but she kept going round there and staying longer into the night, and then one evening she just didn’t leave. Deck goes all shy when I ask him about it, which I take as a good sign. Of course his place is now full of cushions and shoes, and his bathroom is unrecognizable, but with that comes Laura and he seems to approve of the overall deal.

  One night Laura said this to me, while Deck was at the bar: ‘If the angels were looking for a messenger, they could have done a lot worse than him.’

  Then she was very rude about the dress sense of the people at the next table, just to make up for it. But I know she meant it.

  She’s not entirely better. She still drinks more than she should, and there are many days when the clouds are heavy above her. Problems don’t go away immediately, or sometimes even at all: imperfection and sadness are the price you pay for being alive. They can be a high price, and there are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more. It’s a heavy toll. But it’s a fine ride, and sometimes you get to see the sea.

  Which is nothing to what happened, of course, when the angels made contact again nearly two thousand years later. Complete fiasco all round. Humans had moved on by then, put their trust in some new words they’d invented. We weren’t prepared to believe in wings any more, so we believed in spacecraft and flying saucers instead. Where once we’d entertained the idea of people having the spirit moving within them, now we believed in technology—and perceived the angels’ touch as implants instead. Before the invisibles knew where they were, people were leaping up and down on television describing their ray guns and little buggy eyes and how they wanted to spawn with Earth women. The invisibles who’d played at being gods with the Greeks and the Romans probably regarded this situation with a wry smile, thanking their lucky stars they hadn’t played around in an era with the concept of paternity suits.

  The angels had never really wanted me. They wanted a route to Stratten, who’d kept managing to elude them. He was one of those men whose souls are difficult to find, even for angels. He was so visible he barely made a mark on the other side. Memory tampering pushes us in the wrong direction, encourages us to distance ourselves from that which is real and which will remain. The more we dissociate from the living past all around us, the harder it will be for us to go back, just as a refusal to integrate with one’s past is the most certain way of breaking one’s mind.

  He’d cornered the market in disturbing the past, and they wanted his business closed down.

  They were also extremely pissed at the fact that Stratten had helped cause the death of the man they’d been grooming as the next vessel for the Message. They’d decided it was time to try again, and Ray Hammond got the call. He had indeed been getting religion just before he died—but not in the usual sense. He’d been mainlining from the source, and in the last days had been confused and afraid, not knowing if he was losing his mind.

  God hadn’t approved, but he’d let matters unfold, because that was his way. He was glad the plan hadn’t succeeded, not least because he was still dealing with the fallout from the last time. He privately felt it should have been a woman’s turn, and that the basic approach was flawed anyhow. Now that God lives amongst us he’s coming round to the way things are. It gives the visibles somewhere to yearn towards, an invisible heart to where we live. It gives life weight.

  There is only one other way truly to understand that other place, and that is to die. That’s why, in that walk around the school many years ago, I saw my dead grandparents standing to welcome me. They had become invisibles again, as we all will someday do. Form breaks down, our secrets dissolve, and we become part of the carrier wave. Sometimes we feel their presence amongst us, these past people, like currents in an ocean we cannot see: we call them ghosts. We impose upon them once again the shapes they have left behind, believing, as we seem to, that our bodies are where we live
instead of merely where we die.

  They can come back if they want to, after a while and in different shapes, but mainly they stay away. That’s a choice that we will all get to make, somewhere down the years. There are very few lines which cannot be crossed: the only question is when we take the step.

  I finally spoke with my mother’s parents, went and saw them in the Net. We talked for a long time together, and a couple of days later Mom called to say their address had gone dead.

  There is a time for all of us to return to the invisible, but for me it is not yet.

  I like it here.

  That’s what the man in the dark suit told me, anyway, but who knows how much of it was true. You never really know where you are with deities. They’ve got weird agendas. If I’d been Hindu, or Buddhist, or Hopi maybe he’d have told it a little differently, changed a few of the names—but it would have been the same story.

  Then he finished his Frappacino, asked me if I’d mind paying, and got up and left. I watched him until he became one of the crowd, joined the stream of busy individuals going along their ways. Perhaps he will sit behind you in a diner some lunch-time, and you’ll never know he’s there; or you’ll hear his footsteps around the corner one night, and not realize who passed by. Maybe you’ll even see him some time, and look upon his face: but it looks much like ours these days, and you’ll never ask his name.

  I decided not to go back to Griffith, though I did fetch my answering machine and cutlery. I rented a small house in Venice, not far from where Helena and I once lived. It’s pleasant, and I have more than enough appliances now, though some of them still walk with a slight limp and the food processor has taken to wearing a bandanna. I hear them sometimes, in the small hours, gathered in the kitchen reliving their victory. I don’t bother to lock the door at night. I figure anybody who tries robbing the place is going to find a more spirited defence than he bargained for.