by Victor Allen
So you want to make a better life? Well, let me tell you, brother, you’ve come to the right man. Just look around you and turn green. You see this suit I got on? Twenty hours just for the jacket and pants. That chair you’re sittin’ in? Another week’s work. The upkeep on my pad takes me and my wife both workin’, and that doesn’t include the part-time, armed guard. So, yeah, I’ve done pretty well. But, brother, let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I just decided one day to use my brains and here I am today: a self-made, honest man. I’m not ashamed to admit that some of the things I did to get to the top and stay there are looked down on, but in this life you have to scrape bottom just to get ahead.
I didn’t always have all this. At one time I was just another Joe down there amongst those other cats, scraping and scrounging, keeping one ear on the ground and the other on the butt of my .45, trying to make a dishonest living.
There was a time when things weren’t like they are now, if you can believe it. I remember my Gramps tellin’ me that in his day people actually went out to work every day to make an honest living. My grandpa never did a dishonest thing in his life, but back in them days, that was alright, even condoned. You just got to keep in mind, this was a long time ago, before all the clocks got broke in the Upset and never reset. He’d tell me about workin’ at some godforsaken place where you did what someone else told you to do for eight hours at a time. He had a job, a hired hand at a shale oil refinery in Parachute, Colorado. Oil is something they used in them days to run their cars and factories. A lot of people today ain’t never seen any oil and a lot more only know about it from stories. But, brother, if you want some, I can get it. For a price. I ain’t the Kingpin for nothin’!
Grandpa would tell me that back then ‘most everybody would get up at the same time every day and troop down to the factories and punch something called a time clock and go to work for somebody else. Can you feature that? All those folks workin’ for somebody else while this fat cat was sittin’ back, takin’ it easy, and rakin’ in all the dough!
I know that’s hard to believe in this day and age when everybody looks out for number one, but like I said, this was a long time ago. Before it all went bust.
But I figgered it out, you know? People has said about me that if brains was a tin cup, I couldn’t bail out a thimble, but I must be a fi-nan-chul genius to see through this scam.
If you’ve heard the stories you’d know that it went something like this. A few fat cats at the top cyphered out that the best way to make money was to magic it up out of thin air, lend it to governments, and have them pay it back with interest with money extorted from the poor saps that elected them. I know it sounds crazy, but it worked for a long time. Same as ever: shit flows downhill, money flows up. The politicians -another gang who, if they was twice as smart, would still be half-wits- could borrow all they wanted to slop the hogs and buy votes without raisin’ taxes, and the cost was spread out among everybody -including people who wouldn’t be born for another hundred years- in the devaluation of their moolah. Even bums without jobs (bankers called them subprime customers) could borrow all they needed for student loans that paid for four-year-programs on gender studies and the mating customs of the Aardvark. They could buy overpriced houses and overpriced cars from the smiling bankers. All backed up by Uncle Sugar, and all for just a little vig.
Problem was, with all that fake money floatin’ around, it sooner or later became worthless. The subprimers couldn’t pay on their loans ‘cause they couldn’t earn enough counterfeit money to pay the principal and interest. The poor banks went hat in hand to the government for bailouts ‘cause the bums couldn’t pay, the guv’ment went to the federal reserve, the federal reserve made up more money to bail out the banks. Since all the new money was just ones and zeros not actually backed by any kind of production, the only value it had was stolen from the existing money, and the people paid the cost in loss of purchasing power as all the new counterfeit money sloshed into the economy. More and more money bought less and less. Factories shut down or moved their plants across the ocean where slave labor could be had and they didn’t have to dance so much on Uncle’s strings. Prices went up faster than wages, and people got bogged down with so much debt they just couldn’t borrow no more, no matter how low the interest rates went or how long the terms. Businesses was beggin’ to sell five hundred dollar TV’s with payments stretched over five years! Cars was sometimes financed for ten, which was usually four or five years after the car was up on blocks in somebody’s front yard. When people didn’t borrow, they didn’t buy. When people didn’t buy, other people didn’t work. And all this time, the Kilimanjaro of debt that had piled up like a mountain of shit waiting to topple over and suffocate everybody still had to be paid back if it couldn’t be foisted off on great grandkids that hadn’t even been born yet. Somethin’ had to give.
But it didn’t happen all at once. Oh, no. Uncle Sugar had a secret weapon, and he used it. All over the world, people wanted them US dollars. It was what they called the reserve currency, and they had to have it to buy oil (remember oil?), pricey guns and bombs for most of the world’s armies, and just about all the illegal drugs. So the Uncle was able to spread out all them trillions of bux over the rest of the world and dump the reduced value on them. What a con! Like I said, I figgered it out, but I coulda never thunk it up.
This went on, God knows, a helluva lot longer than it should have. But it’s hard to say no to the barrel of a gun, ya dig? And Uncle had the biggest and bestest guns and bombs in the whole shootin’ gallery. And when times got really bad, it wasn’t nothin’ a good war wouldn’t fix right up. It got the money flowin’ again, folks back to work, and their concentration on some evil commie bastard or towel-wearing Arab across the ocean.
Even though it steam-rollered on for more’n a hundred years, it couldn’t last forever. People finally woke up. Not here, oh, hell no! We was too busy with video games, prescription anti-depressants, pro sports and whatever bubble-assed, bottle-blond trollop had been knocked up the week before by the latest gold-toothed rap star to really give a damn. And, much as I hate to say it, we was too dumb, graduatin’ people outta high schools what couldn’t even read or do simple math. Hell, next to some of them, I’m a fuckin’ Albert Bernstein. But that was okay, too. The Uncle didn’t want people to be too smart. They mighta seen the con.
When the leaky old USS America finally hit the iceberg, it was the bricks what done it in. Now I don’t mean bricks like the brick house in The Three Little Pigs, but groups of countries. Economic blocs they was called. There was one called Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The BRICS.
Now a lot of the Uncle’s debt was bought by the godless Chinee. They could afford it ‘cause all the American factory jobs had been shipped over there. They’d make cheap, Chinee crap, send it over here, and we would buy it. The four hundred pound Rascal Jockeys at the Big Box stores couldn’t get enough of it. Them Chinee was buyin’ our debt with our own money and gettin’ paid interest on it. It don’t take a rocket surgeon to figger out that when you buy shit with made up money, and produce nothin’ of your own to balance out the barter, before long all the money in your pocket ends up in their pocket. It happened before, and it wasn’t pretty. If’n you can get ahold of a book to tell you about it, you might want to study on the Opium Wars, about a time a like thing happened.
But they was shrewd, them Chinamen, and they learned a thing or two from them Opium Wars. When you owe someone, they make you dance to their tune. They could build factories hand over fist and pollute till the cows came home, force their people into slave wage factories, make incursions into Black Africa, and not a peep from Uncle. He was beholden.
But when the Russians and Chinee got together, the writin’ was on the wall. They decided amongst themselves that the Fedbux was too unwieldy, used as a weapon and built like a house on shifting sand, and they wasn’t gonna play the game no more. By then, the Chinee was the biggest importer of oil in the world and what did the Russkies
have to sell? You guessed it: oil and gas. So they first decided to trade with each other in a different currency, bypassing the Fedbux altogether, and bringing along a few other oil producing countries as well. Then they built an oil pipeline overland so’s the Uncle’s navy couldn’t blockade the Chinee oil supply routes. Gotta keep the new Silk Road open. Once that happened, it was game over. The petrodollar started to thrash in death agonies. What was Uncle to do? Leveling a gun at the Russian Bear and Chinese Dragon was a whole lot different than dropping bombs on some Middle East sandlot. All the paper that the Chinee had bought, Russians, too, came due and they told Uncle Pay Me.
Normally, the way Uncle paid his bills was to borrow more money to pay back the money he’d already borrowed. But the bank of China was closed. The private banks that made up the Federal Reserve cried foul and said the Fed couldn’t backstop the debt, dusting off the tired hymnal and singin’ the song that buyin’ more, worthless federal paper would crash a banking system already leveraged at 80 to 1. The too big to jail bankers told Uncle to take a hike, they wasn’t gonna expose their balance sheets to contagion. What was Uncle gonna pay with? There were no factory goods to pay with (all the factories had been shipped over to China, remember?); the shale boom had gone bust so we had no excess domestic oil supply to grease the Chinamen; there was no surplus wheat because the wheat farmers had planted corn to cash in on the ethanol boom; there was no corn because all the corn had been turned into ethanol; and there was no gold. Fort Knox had been looted decades before. Was we gonna pay off with fast food hamburgers and fries? So, with the Uncle standing there with his pockets turned out, unable to borrow more money from the bank to pay back the bank, and the Fed unwilling to magic up more funny money for fear of a banking crash, he did the only thing he could.
Like countless rulers before who had already taxed the powerless unborn with debt and the silent dead with inheritance taxes, he plundered his own subjects by stealing the existing money.
He stole it from the pensions and 401K’s and bond holders. He stole it from Social Security and Medicare. He stole it from private bank accounts; giving every depositor a twenty percent haircut. In high finance, this is called a “bail in”. He closed the banks and shut down ATM’s and wire transfers. He gave all the people he robbed a piece of paper, a “note”, which was supposed to be as good as the money he stole, but was as worthless as all the other Fed-issued securities. By then it was too late. Cash flowed out of the country like water through the shadow banking system, either payin’ off debt or lookin’ for safe haven. The money supply shriveled up like a slug on a salt block, interest rates shot up like a Saturn V, wages and prices dropped like a hooker’s drawers, and credit got tighter than a thong on Oprah. There was just no money to be had at any price. What few jobs and industries that was left couldn’t make their expenses and went under. Supply chains started to break as ungrateful foreigners refused to trade with the Uncle, wanting something more than the Fedbux for their real shit like coffee and bananas.
There’s an old saying in the ad business: you can’t make the people eat the dog food and the coop de grace was when the people finally woke up to the con. The EBT and SNAP cards didn’t work no more: there was no money. Government payments were drastically reduced or eliminated altogether: there was no money. Guv’ment buildings, offices, and public works projects shut down: there was no money. It was then that everybody realized: there never had been any money. It had all been debt. Once faith was gone, people saw that their money was really all it had ever been: little pieces of paper and plastic.
My grandpa told me about it. The Prez-i-dent himself came on the TV before both houses of congress, stickin’ his chin out like Benito Mussolini and jackin’ his jaws about how everything was fine, everything was under control, the US economy was safe as houses. The whole time the assembled rookery of trained seals barked and clapped at his every lie. Whenever Gramps would tell that story, it always made me think of Otto Von Bismarck sayin’ “never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” It must have been a priceless instant – and I ain’t sayin’ I wouldn’t have give a hundred dollars to see it- ‘cause midway through the Prez-i-dent’s speech was the exact moment the power grid went down.
When the lights went and the mountain of debt tipped over, the shit-covered peasants pried themselves away from their video games and TMZ and Survivor and spilled into the streets, rioting, burning, looting, grabbing what they could before it was all snapped up. Maybe they didn’t even know why, but they had finally caught on that the game had been riggered somehow. Meantime, all the banking monkeys and the politicians that could, afraid that the mob would figure out that they was the ones what had engineered the whole scam, had packed up their gold and real assets and flown away to cower under the protection of their accordion grinders in Basel, Switzerland.
Burger-flipper, farm hand, and Welfare Queen alike, armed with small caliber firearms and Molotov cocktails, faced off with cops in riot gear and carrying semi-automatic 9 mils, and National Guard troopers with light armored vehicles and M-16’s. The thing was no love fest. The people weren’t eating the dog food anymore. The only bright spot, near as I could tell, was that a lot of military people refused to fire on other Americans, and a lot of cops stayed home to protect their own families. They’d seen through the swindle. The Uncle had robbed their bank accounts, too.
It could have been a lot worse than it was, but it left the country in tatters; a hundred thousand dead in the first wave of riots, later on maybe another couple million from starvation, crime, and disease. That’s not a lot in a country of over three hundred million, but every one of those lives -cop, crook, or kid- was some mother’s son or daughter. I ain’t tryin’ to make light of how bad it was, but in the burning aftermath, there was lots more pressing business and tears could get you killed. There was no money to run the sewage and water treatment plants, no money for the hospitals (the ones that had escaped the initial rioting, anyway), no power to keep the nuke plants from melting down, no petrol or fertilizer for the farmers. Even the seed corn had been eaten.
It never sunk to the level of a Mad Max, but it didn’t miss it by much. What few resources that was left went into securing the borders (wonder why they didn’t think of that a lot sooner) from “foreign aggressors”, and protecting the feudal lords and big farms, them left to run things figgering that people with full bellies was less likely to take a run at ‘em with torches and pitchforks. Most of the areas outside the metros became the Wild West. Out in the backwoods and wilderness, it was barely possible to get by in small, little settlements if you had enough guns and bullets to protect the children and womenfolk. It was hard, but the cities was a lot worse.
That’s where guv’ment control was restored first, but everybody knew who the real power was: the gangs ran the cities. The Sicilian and Irish Mobs, the Kosher Nostra, Triads, Yakuza and Drug cartel top bananas kept order in what was little different than concentration camps where the prisoners worked for the gang bosses under pain of death, hoping for bones from their table. The leftover politicians knew who buttered their bread and they sucked up to the crime bosses to keep their own sorry hides safe.
The USA had finally got to where it wanted to be: aside from a few at the very top, everybody was equal. Equally poor. The new normal was bands of raiders versus small enclaves of people trying to stay free. There was some little bit of money, mostly a hundred different kinds of IOU’s written amongst local groups, and it worked pretty well between agreeable parties. The farmers and electricians and well-diggers became the new rock stars. The precious metal alchemists -those who could turn lead and brass into bullets- were gods. If you didn’t have a skill to trade, you was shit out of luck.
And that was me, you know? I don’t talk so well, but I got a four year degree in Hospitality Management. Got a piece of paper to prove it. Cost me a hundred grand (well, it cost the wage slaves a hundred grand. At the time I borrowed it, the funny money
was still spewin’ like mother’s milk from the government tit) and it ain’t completely useless. I could use it to plug a hole in my shoe or wipe my ass, but I sure as hell can’t eat it. So I turned to the gun. I never wanted to hurt nobody, but I had a family. It was beg, borrow or steal just to survive, and the easiest of the three was to steal. All my life as a dishonest man I’d wonder how anybody could get sucked into tryin’ to rebuild the shit show we had before. I believed that bad guys finished first, dishonesty was the best policy, and the Nine commandments were my God. Ha! Some God. Even now I can remember them:
1. Theft.
2. Robbery.
3. Burglary.
4. Gigolotry and Prostitution.
5. Counterfeiting (worked real well for many years).
6. Murder for a Wage.
7. Kidnapping for Ransom.
8. Hijacking.
9. Extortion.
Now at one time I was a firm believer in the Nine Commandments, but it got to the point where I just couldn’t steal enough. I’d go out and knock over somebody’s hoard, and the very next day some guy would show up with pictures of me -after tyin’ on a hundred-year-drunk- with some chippie wearing pants tight enough to cut a second gash next to the one God gave her and threaten to show them to my wife if I didn’t cough up some coin. What did I have to trade? What I had stole the day before? So there I’d be, flat broke again with two kids to feed. So I’d have to burgle somebody else and maybe come away with a few beans or some local scrip that might or might not work to buy me somethin’ before somebody else would stick me up on the way home! I’ll tell you, I was really gettin’ tired of that rat race.
Everybody took advantage of me. Me! Johnny Lane, the world’s most dishonest man. In the time after the Upset, if you couldn’t eat it, wear it, live in it, or warm ya ass with it, it was a no sell for me. But people were trickin’ me into tradin’ for useless shit like hand fashioned jewelry and mimeographed agitprop for cripes sakes! Some nights I’d sit down and talk to my wife about ways to get ahead, to make a big score. We’d come up with ideas, but the only way left to scratch out a livin’ was to get dirty and make myself useful. I tell you, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to get up every morning and soil my hands by choppin’ wood or haulin’ water, or diggin’ latrines. No more sleepin’ till noon. But my kids was hungry, my boots was over a year old and ragged and nobody was makin’ anymore to steal.
And that night changed my life. I told my wife that I was gonna go legit and go to work. I knew her folks would hate it, and we’d probably lose all our friends, but she said she’d still love me no matter what.
The next day I got up at the crack of dawn, put on what I figgered were work clothes that I’d scrounged up out of a warehouse somewhere, shaved, and marched down to the settlement gates and presented myself for work. I gotta say, showin’ up at them gates with a coupla guards pointin’ the less friendly end of the gun at me showed me the world in a whole ‘nother light.
I had to lay low for a couple of years, but eventually my friends found out and drifted away. It’s strange what you find out about your partners in crime when you become something they’re not used to. But my wife, Jane, and me had found some new friends. After a while it didn’t bother me that I was livin’ like a normal, boring citizen. I even got to the point where I enjoyed havin’ a steady income of scrip that would let me trade without a gun. And all the excitement hadn’t left my life. There were times when I had a whole day off. A weekend, they called it. I sure couldn’t do that in the crooked world where it was root, hog, or die every day.
So, yeah, I’ve done pretty well. Worked my tail off for a coupla years and edjicated myself. We got the water plant workin’ and the power back on and, let me tell you, I ain’t ashamed to say I felt proud. So I got me a nice little racket goin’ now, keepin’ the water works flowin’. People look up to me, you know? I got respect.
Conscience? Hell no! I did what I had to do. Even my former life of crime comes in handy when I have to walk the wall with my piece. They’s still a lot of thieves disguised as philosopher kings that want to complete the job of “restoring order”. They’re worse than the robbers that sometimes try to raid the place. So I still have to watch out, make sure nobody sticks up my wife or knocks over my hoard. That’s why I didn’t give you my real name. I gotta be careful, you know?
So you want to get outta the muck and the mud? If you ain’t afraid to take a chance, and you ain’t worried what your friends will say about you, do this: swallow your pride and work for a livin’. I’m living proof that there’s still room for an honest man.
No Title
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
It was on a night just like tonight that I first walked on the beach with her. We had meandered slowly, hand in hand, down the bleached, white sands of the Gulf.
I recall the moon overhead, just a sliver then, partly covered by huge, pillowy clouds, but still bright where it shone, gold-plating the soft margins of the partial overcast. The surf was endless and unrelenting, digging at the sand, drawing it back to its matriarch, the unending sea. Even with all this, though, the memory that keeps coming back is her eyes. Eyes that looked not out at the unquiet sea, but upward, looking for something. Eyes filled with longing.
Her name was Carla and she came out of nowhere and, as far as I know, that’s where she returned. But I don’t really believe that. I know she’s out there somewhere, but I don’t think she’s waiting anymore.
I met her in July, almost a year ago now. There was nothing special in the meeting, not special in the way you think it would be when you meet the person that alters your life in a way you could never imagine. It doesn’t seem right, not then, not now, but that’s the way it is.
Carla was never what you would call ordinary. For one thing, she was really beautiful, but not in the way you would call classical beauty. Don’t ask me what I mean by that because I can’t articulate it. She just had something about her, an elusive, ineffable quality that causes unadorned words to fall short. I guess it was mostly her eyes, the most beautiful shade of blue I’d ever seen, the perfect complement to her Rapunzel-length, blond locks. I can only remember one time when she wasn’t smiling, and I’ll get to that in a bit.
She would drop by my house occasionally, sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone. I was always glad to see her. After a few weeks, I asked her out. She accepted and things just proceeded naturally from there until that night on the beach two weeks ago.
I guess the reason I’m out here tonight is because my world ended when hers was reborn. There is another world and Carla is in it. If I can’t be with her, well, this world can do with one less useless eater. I didn’t really mind my life or my world but, before she left, Carla told me about a world that was a better place. Better than here, better than any place I could dream or imagine.
Like I said, Carla wasn’t ordinary. Sometimes when we were out in the woods walking along the trails, or just driving along on our way to the movies, she would tell me about places she had been and people she had known. Wild-eyed stories about things that couldn’t have been of this world. She would become rapt, almost dreamy and I would watch those blue eyes darken to violet when she talked about the Caves of Kirinjiru or the Cabridii. She told me about towns that weren’t on any map, places where magic happened. She talked about gods that I had never heard of in any pantheon.
She acted as if all these things were real. Real memories and a longing for places abandoned, maybe never to be seen again. She was... out of place, maybe even out of time.
Carla lived in a fantasy world of her own device and always seemed happiest when talking about it. She told me that we weren’t the first. There had been many before us, mortal and immortal. And some of them were waiting to come back. It was their world in the first place she said, and they would have it back. Sometimes, though, she would lose a little of her happiness and w
onder why they would want it back. Why this one little blue marble, she wondered aloud, when the entire cosmos was their toy? And if it were all true, I think she found the answer when she looked into my eyes. There might have been one thing on this tiny little planet that couldn’t be found anywhere else.
Just before she went away, she told me she thought it was time for her to go. She had begun to talk in her sleep, repeating things that sounded like:
Gyoigo, gyo’igo
K’a’ala, Kr’cal’ic.
Set’ai, soilot.
I was a little worried about her. Up until then she had been able to keep her fantasy world on a pretty tight rein, but she seemed to be losing her grip. I could only imagine what dreams stirred darkly beneath her unsettled eyelids as she slept. Were they of Gods? Monsters? Aliens?
That was the night we walked on the beach, the night she went away. I think of that now because, other than the moon having grown from a sliver to a cold, silver Christmas ornament, this night is just like that night two weeks ago. The beach was strewn with gum wrappers and plastic bottles, and beer cans glittered on the sands like stars fallen on a gray sky. The breeze carried the roar of the surf and the odor of rotting fish that had washed up. Dried kelp laid on the sands in dark lumps.
But it was still a lover’s beach. Carla and I passed many couples that night and they, like us, were in their own world with nothing to bother them, nothing to worry over. Nothing mattered to them but each other.
The next morning she was gone. She had left everything. I guess seeing the pearl ring on the table was what convinced me. She had often said you can’t take it with you. And she had left something extra. A one line note: Espero con Esperanza.
I wait with hope.
I didn’t call the police. We weren’t married, or even engaged. She had come from the darkness into the light, and she had receded back into the darkness, a shadow player from the stage wings. She was alright. I knew that.
So now there is only me, walking down the beach tonight. Waiting, I suppose, but for what I’m not sure. I am curiously alone, with no lovers or fisherman about. That’s alright. I need the solitude. Maybe Carla remembers. Maybe she knows I’ve been thinking about what she told me. She might even know that I can’t live here anymore. I lost my job, you know. I’ve been sleeping on the beach and eating whatever offal the seagulls and crabs don’t get first. Something had better happen soon. I think before long some local yokel city cop will haul me up and make me an offer I can't refuse: a bus ticket to “anywhere but here.”
I look up, just as Carla used to, and my eye is drawn to the dazzling light descending from behind the gilt edged clouds, detaching as if a bright orb spawned by the full moon. It is aglow, oblong, and it grows larger as it descends, its lava light now echoed and churning in the restless waves. I am not afraid as it hovers over the beach, a vague outline of solidity now visible behind the purring, white light.
The glow dims to near nothingness and the ship is now just a semi-dark outline above the fretful dispute between sand and surf. When the door opens, lasering out a blazing white light that ribbons along the sand like a luminous carpet, I know it is Carla. Whether she has come back to take me away, or they have returned in force to reclaim what is theirs, I don’t know or care.
I run, stumbling, weak from lack of food, slogging through the knee deep water, faltering more than once. The salt water clings to my hair, my beard, washing away some of the grit from my fortnight of sloth.
And she is there, standing in the light. Her hair is snakes and two bulging red eyes pulse in the center of her wrinkled forehead. Her mouth is a monstrous cave of glittering stalactites and the hands with which she beckons me are black-nailed claws.
I regain my footing and shake my head to clear the salt water from my bewildered eyes. Hesitating but an instant, I slosh eagerly forward through the swirling waves that urgently try to pull me back to safety. I fight through it because whatever awaits me -depravity, delight, or death- on that hovering ship of light, my love is there with it.
Faith
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
Alan Frost pulled up to the building, eased himself from his rented car, and clicked the door shut. The cold made his joints ache more than usual. Vapor plumed from his nostrils and he blew on his hands to warm them. There was only a single street light to joust with the night and its flickering glow pooled in a sad circle on the gravel parking lot. He pulled his coat tighter around him as he looked at the building.
It had been a schoolhouse back in the thirties. It was long and low, half brick and half wood with tall, double-paned windows that glowed with yellow, non-fluorescent light that spilled out into the icy, Fall night and tossed knife-sharp shadows from the leafless trees.
The parking lot was speckled with pickup trucks and older vehicles sporting peeling paint and decaying mufflers held up with twisted coat hangers. Through the schoolhouse windows, Alan saw a fair number of people assembled and knew if he had arrived a little earlier, he would have heard hymns being sung and drifting into the stillness of the night.
He had asked for this gig, winging his way from New York into Flyover Country this afternoon and driving his rented car to the charmless little town of Currant, NC. He had no love for the quacks that parted sick people from their money and gave them false hope. The FTC had managed to put Cyrus Taylor’s Traveling Con Show in its coffin a year earlier, and he was here to complete the job of shoveling dirt into the grave.
He walked into the building, welcoming the warmth inside. A few heads in the room turned at his arrival, but no-one spoke. The antechamber -the waiting room for those who had come to be healed- was even more depressing than the building’s exterior. Most of the pilgrims were older people. Wrinkled skin, bleached-white dentures, and gray hair were the order of the night. Walkers and canes clattered in abundance in the aisles and a couple of aged pensioners in wheelchairs patiently awaited their audience with the miracle man. A fair number of those waiting held chickens in their arms, or baskets of fruit or homemade syrups and jams. A poorly dressed woman of haggard countenance held a clutch of two dozen eggs arranged in a pyramid. She favored Alan with an uncertain smile, the melancholy in her face telepathing her anxiety that her gift would prove insufficient.
Down a hallway, Alan could see the main attraction in a small room at the end of a hallway. Cyrus Taylor was little more than a boy, barely twenty-two years old, with thick, black hair carelessly combed. He might have been five-seven, soaking wet. Blind from birth, his eyes were a secret hidden behind old-fashioned, plastic-framed sunglasses. He sat behind a table while those with whom he held audience bowed their heads and prayed. The run down building, the poor chairs and the meager surroundings were a sorry comedown from the days he had packed auditoriums on nationwide revivals. That was before the FTC had come down on him with both feet and a sledgehammer. He had managed to beat the rap, but, looking at him now, he might as well have been in a six by nine cell.
Their consultation concluded, the elderly couple at the table before Cyrus slowly stood up and turned to make their way back down the hallway. The elderly man helped his wife hobble down the narrow corridor, her cane thumping on the wooden floor. The woman’s face was untroubled and with a serene glow that Alan didn’t understand.
So much for healing the lame, he thought. She would have done better consulting a fortune teller.
Alan watched the couple pass out of the building, a cold hiccup of wind gusting through as the door was opened. Then the door closed and they were gone, only to be replaced by another hopeful rising from the audience and making the slow promenade down the hallway.
Alan talked with several of the people in the waiting room and had the bulk of the story he wanted before ever speaking to Cyrus. He watched the same charade of “healing” occur a dozen times more before the last attendee besides himself closed the door behind him. As if in anticipation
, Cyrus turned his sightless eyes towards him, almost as if he could see Alan, and motioned him to come down the hallway. It was a little creepy.
As Alan stepped into the room, his heavy overcoat draped over his arm, he noticed the gifts of food set carefully on a table out of the way. There were no fowl to be seen.
Without thinking, and before he could stop himself, Alan blurted out,“Where are the chickens?”
“People pay what they can,” Cyrus replied. “We have no need for livestock. Better to let them keep their hens so they can eat the eggs.”
Alan held out his hand and introduced himself, as well as producing his credentials from the American Fanfare, a scandal sheet only a little less notorious than the Enquirer. Alan couldn’t really see what it was, but Cyrus had his hands below the table and seemed to be doing something like counting rosaries or feeling his way around a puzzle, and that might have been what kept him from putting out his own hand. When Cyrus made no move to respond it was up to Cyrus’s companion in the room to remind Alan of what should have been obvious.
“He can’t see,” the man said. “He doesn’t know you have your hand out.”
Embarrassed, Alan withdrew his hand and sat down. Cyrus’s companion stood by his right side. Whatever light had been stolen from Cyrus Taylor’s eyes had found their way into those of his associate. He was a very tall man with ice blue irises, almost albino-like, only a whisper away from colorless. His sedate black suit looked as if he had been born to it and his heavy brow ridges lent him a thuggish, threatening quality.
“Emmanuel Green,” Cyrus said. “My attendant. We call him Manny.” Manny made no effort to shake hands and Alan was glad. The man was a little frightening. Tall, rat-tail thin and dour as a Baptist preacher with those white eyes staring into him. Alan wasn’t about to call him anything.
Thanks,” Alan said, “for agreeing to see me. You have, to put it mildly, been out of the spotlight since your... unpleasantness with the FTC.” He pulled out an electronic recorder and set it on the table.
Cyrus seemed to debate something internally for a second, then reverted to the phantom of a smile.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, first off, how do you feel about the charges that were leveled against you?”
“I was acquitted,” Cyrus said. “What more is there to say?”
“Do you think the charges were just? Do you think it was right to take money from all those people under false pretenses? To give them false hope? Do you think you should be in jail?”
Cyrus didn’t rise to the bait, but sustained the diminutive, tranquil smile upon his lips.
“I never took money under false pretenses.”
“The FTC would differ with you.”
Cyrus took a slow breath through his nose. When he spoke, his voice was entirely unruffled.
“Why do you have this animus against me?”
“I watched a dozen people walk out of this place tonight, after giving you everything they could possibly spare. Poor people, sick people that should be seeing a doctor, not you. I didn’t see any of them healed.”
“Perhaps,” Cyrus said, “God doesn’t work on your timetable. Maybe He has a different purpose you can’t fathom. Maybe simple peace of mind is the best thing for these people. One of man’s greatest sins is claiming to know the Will of God.” Cyrus paused. “Perhaps your pain muddles your mind.”
Alan’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re hurting,” Cyrus said. “It’s not too bad today, but on some days you can barely move. I’m thinking Rheumatoid Arthritis, a cruel joke -one dropped stitch- played on you by God while you were still being knit together in your mother’s womb.”
“If it is,” Alan said, sensing an opening, “maybe you can convince me that you’re not a flim flam artist.”
“Ah,” Cyrus said. “You want a show. You realize that I do nothing? God works through me and it is His choice as to who is healed and who is not?”
“That’s a convenient out for you, isn’t it?”
“If you choose to see it that way. Despite that, I’ll give you your show. That’s really what you’re here for, isn’t it? But it’s going to cost you. Maybe more than you’re willing to pay. Do you still want it?”
“Is that some kind of threat,” Alan cast a quick look at the menacing presence of Manny standing by Cyrus’s side.
“Why would God threaten? He holds all the cards. He sets down a set of rules and if you don’t follow them, that’s on your head. Tears are too late when you’ve lived an ungodly life and are suddenly confronted with the cost of your sin.”
“I’ll risk it. What’s the price of a ticket to this freak show?”
“Just a few questions. And a test.” Cyrus’s smile finally touched his teeth and they shone in a grin. “God always wants a test.”
“Alright. Fire away.”
“You arrived by car, did you not?”
“Yes. From the airport.”
“You return to New York in the morning?”
“Of course.”
From beneath the table, Cyrus produced a legal pad and laid it out on the table top with all the slow, tactile finesse of a blind man. Drawn in pencil on the legal pad was a very good rendering of an airliner in a downward spiral, one of its engines in flames, lightning flashing in the background and smoke billowing from the stricken engine. On its tail was the ID number of the plane Alan would be taking back to New York in the morning.
“Do not,” Cyrus warned, “get on that plane.”
Alan looked at the drawing for a few seconds, then dismissed it.
“Do you expect me to believe you just drew that?”
“Only if you have faith in what God can do through man. I sense you have lost that faith. If you ever had it.”
“Even a poor mind reader,” Alan said, “could see that. Or a blind man. I don’t suppose,” he went on, “you’d be willing to take off those sunglasses? Let me take a peek at those milky whites?”
“I would not. My medical issues are a matter of public record. They’re not fake.”
“I tried to reach your doctor,” Alan said casually. “He’s not in. The answering service said he’s golfing at Hilton Head?”
“Nothing scandalous about that. He has a private plane that he flies there once a month. He’s due back tomorrow morning. You might run into him at the airport.”
“I’ll make a point of it.”
Cyrus seemed troubled, his concern molding itself into a stern line on his lower jaw, just below his lips.
“I have been derided all my life,” he said. “Called a Snake Oil salesman, false prophet, crook, swindler and con man. What is that compared to being sightless and an outcast? But this is what God asked of me. And while you judge me and scoff at the Will of God, you might do well to remember that the Bible has two parts. A New Testament and an Old. The Old Testament God was jealous and did not take kindly to being mocked. The Old Testament God created the world and all that was in it, only to destroy it and start again. The Old Testament God slew entire nations and mighty armies. Are you sure,” Cyrus asked, “that’s the sort of Power you want to piss off?”
“That might frighten me if I were a ten year old schoolgirl living in 1620,” Alan said, “or didn’t have more than one firing brain cell. So either show me what you got or let me get out of here and back to my hotel.”
Cyrus motioned Manny to come closer. Alan was a little uncomfortable as he realized he was alone in this room with a couple of fruitcakes. There was something about Manny that was beyond intimidating. He moved with a liquid, overarching grace that was almost like gliding and his black suit flowed like a hanging judge’s robes. He stood directly next to Cyrus and glared silently down at Alan, a dangerous dislike plain in those cold orbs, like a snarling dog with bared canines about to strike.
“Give me your hands,” Cyrus said.
Alan extended his arms slowly across the table
, not showing the pain in his face as his aching shoulders barked out their objection. He was now less dismissive of the whole farce than he would have expected. He could not brush aside the palpable sensation of power that came through Cyrus’s hands as he grasped each of Alan’s forearms. It wasn’t earth-moving or startling -Alan didn’t roll on the floor with his eyes rolled up, or speak in tongues- but it was real.
Cyrus held onto Alan’s arms for a full five seconds that seemed to last an age. He never spoke, he never looked up, just held Alan’s arms in a fierce grip that seemed impossible for someone of his miniscule build. The grinding, unrelenting pain in Alan’s lower back and shoulders eased. It didn’t vanish completely, but its severity had unquestionably lessened.
Alan wanted to pull his arms back from the strange sensation but forced himself to wait, knowing that to show surprise would give the fraud a victory. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. After a few more seconds, Cyrus released Alan’s arms.
Cyrus sat back, completely complacent. If his face was any indication of the effort he had just expended, he might have done no more than tick up a thermostat.
When Alan didn’t speak, Cyrus broke the silence.
“Show’s over,” he said. “How was it?”
“Would have been better with popcorn,” Alan answered. “I have to admit, I do feel a little better. But placebos can do that. It won’t last.”
“ ‘You do not believe, though you have seen,’ ” Cyrus quoted. “What else can I do?”
“Even the Monkey’s Paw granted three wishes,” Alan poked. “Can’t your god do better than that?”
For the first time, Cyrus showed a flash of anger. “You came here to extract your pound of flesh like some cut rate Shylock. You wanted me to jump through hoops like a trained dog. Your mind was closed from the moment you walked in the door and nothing that happened here was going to change it. So you’ve got your pound of flesh, you’ve seen your show, and your mind is yet closed. I think you should leave. Manny will show you out.”
Alan gathered up his recorder and his coat and stood up. Manny came around the table and any parting shots Alan might have wanted to squeeze off were quickly squelched by the seven foot tall caregiver. Cyrus had turned away in his chair and gazed blindly at a wall.
Just before seeing Alan out the door and into the starry icebox of the night, Manny halted the pair at the doorway and stared into Alan’s eyes. Manny’s gaze somehow seemed less resolute, almost kind.
“You aren’t the first to mock God, nor will you be the last. Jesus in his passion knew this, begging forgiveness for those who knew not what they did. Heed these words if you never heed anything else: Do not get on that plane.”
Manny opened the door and, as Alan walked out of the building, Manny said one last thing:
“You’ve been warned.”