Revolution

by Michael Sutherland

  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."

  "It's true!"

  He didn't even look up when I slammed my hands on the table.

  "If you get out of your chair one more time it'll be another injection, a stronger one. And they will keep getting stronger until you cooperate. Now sit down."

  So I sat. I obeyed. What else could I do? There were no windows. The only door was made of steel and that had a tumbler lock on it - all numbers, no key, all very very secure. There was also, of course, that bruiser in the corner with the repeater popgun in his claws.

  "Good. So, Desert Center, what happened there?" he said.

  "It came down from the sky."

  I sighed shuffling the empty coffee carton across the table, left hand, right hand. When what I really wanted to do was smack it at his face.

  "The spaceman?" he said.

  "The ship."

  "And at what time was this?"

  "It was eleven in the morning. The sky was clear blue, and it just appeared."

  I was resigned to rote. Monosyllabic if I could get away with it.

  "Out of nowhere," he tapped his pencil at the pad.

  "Look, I've said it a million times."

  "Okay, so what did it look like?"

  "A bubble."
<
br />   "A bubble?"

  "Yes, a bubble."

  Up straight – chair hits wall. And Tommy Gunn in the corner grips the trigger of his machinegun tighter.

  "Sit down!"

  I sat.

  "I thought you said it was a flying saucer," the doc said.

  "It was like a bubble of light for Christ sake, when I first saw it coming down!"

  "Out of a clear blue sky you say. Go on. Tell me what it looked like."

  So I did, nice and slow.

  "Like a fucking flying saucer."

  #

  "We've got your mother here," the good doctor smiled straightening his crooked tie.

  "My mother's dead. She died giving birth to me," I said.

  His eyebrows shot up. It was something else to pin me down to the butterfly board of nutcases, category - Maternal Guilt.

  "Mrs. Andresen?" he said to the open door.

  And there she stepped it, all black veil and tear brimming eyes.

  #

  "Sean," she said, "that picture was of your father, remember? It was taken even before you were born."

  "Who the hell are you?" I yelled at her.

  That's when the good doctor, and his white coat wide boys, rushed me and slapped duck tape to my mouth.

  Now all I could do was look at him and her talking to each other like I wasn't there, her dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief that the good doctor had whipped out of his top pocket.

  "I'm sorry about this, doctor," she said. "But he's been this way for years. We tried to shield him, of course. But in the end," she raised her hands, "it was impossible. Paranoid schizophrenia, you see? He doesn't even know who he is himself most of the time. The poor boy, all those things about aliens and flying saucers, I thought he would grow out of it, but instead he kept getting worse and, oh..."

  And there she broke down.

  I would have clapped but my arms were strapped to the chair.

  The doctor held her hand.

  "Mrs. Andresen," he said, "we don't want trouble. I can see that you've had enough as it is. Neither of us wants to be embroiled in a legal case now do we?"

  Eyelids fluttering she looked up at him.

  "You're very understanding, doctor."

  "The extradition is easy to deal with," he said sitting back and looking at me. "He's obviously insane. He's not going anywhere, and as for a court case, well..."

  "How can I be of assistance?" Mrs. Andresen perked up.

  "I can sign over his mental status to you and you could take over his financial affairs."

  Now that did make me mad. So mad I thought my eyes were going to pop out. They almost did when they rammed that needle in my arm.

  "As far as the money he stole," the doctor went on, "you could hand it over to its rightful owner. But then again, as no one knows this poor deluded young man is here for treatment, and he is in no fit state to speak for himself, what you decide to do with it would be up to you."

  She looked at me, simpering through her veil.

  "I understand, doctor," she smiled. "I don't know what possessed him to make that claim, charging for an old photograph of his poor dead father."

  What a bitch.

  "It's a sickness, Mrs. Andresen," the doctor patted her hand, "one that unfortunately makes everyone's life, especially those who love and care for him, an unbearable hell. I'm sure the extradition charges will be dropped when I write my report. And we have all the facilities here to make sure that society is safe, and give this poor young man the proper treatment that he so obviously needs."

  She looked at me and sniffed back a tear with a smile.

  "Thank you, doctor," she said.

  #

  Twelve years it took me to find a way out of that maximum security cracker palace.

  It took me six hours to get back.

  And nothing was going to stop me from proving my sanity.

  #

  My axe tore through the wood. But before I knew it I was kicking and screaming as they stuffed my arms into the sleeves and pulled the straps tight.

  #

  "You made it, back," Mrs. Andresen said as she sat behind my desk.

  She didn't even stand up.

  "How many years has it been?" she asked.

  "Since like forever," I said.

  "I think you owe this man an apology," she said.

  I looked over at my filing cabinet.

  "How are you feeling?" the doctor said.

  I struggled inside the straitjacket.

  "This is kidnapping," I said.

  "This is justice," she said.

  "You stole my money," he said.

  "And you killed five people getting here," she said lighting up a cigarette.

  "What did you expect," I said.

  "And it wasn't always easy clearing the path to let you back. You should thank me," she said.

  "What?"

  "You really don't think that it was that easy to evade the police, do you? Of course, scrambling the wires of communication, never mind erasing your records, helped."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "That we wanted you back," she said. "Don't you see? It was planned from the very beginning. We put you in there because we had to change things about you a bit, and we got you back out again. Voila!"

  "You're insane," I said.

  She stood up.

  "And you are a mass murderer."

  #

  "We're restoring a balance of nature," she said. "When one of us lands here, one of you has to disappear. It's not very nice were we come from, but then again, that depends on your point of view. And we like it here. So we're staying.

  "There's so much culture on this planet," she went on, "so much resentment and hate on a scale never dreamed of where we come from. Here you have wine and war, love and hate on a global scale. There's just so much... tension all the time. On this planet you can be a dictator and get away with causing untold misery. Or make millions for being a brainless idiot as long as you look good and smile a lot at a camera. Brilliant!"

  "We don't have anything like that back home," the doctor said lighting his pipe. "No no, it's perfect utopia. No disease or dysfunction, nothing needing to be put right because there's never anything that goes wrong. You will just hate it there. I know you will. And if you don't die of boredom first you'll end up cutting your throat instead. That's why we left, and why we're sending you there.

  "You should have destroyed that letter," Mrs. Andresen said. "If you had, you wouldn't be in the mess you're in now. Temptation is the first link in the chain. The letter was a vector, you see, and burning it would have destroyed the monoclonal antibodies impregnated into the paper, tiny little signals that bored right through your skin every time you touched it. But keeping let us know that we were onto the right type, someone who is easy to manipulate, who is weak and needy all at the same time. You were perfect.

  "It was easy to track you after that. Of course, you were also being changed by it, slowly being infected and transformed. But you just had to keep it though, didn't you, Sean? Like a drug."

  "And all because of a photograph," the doctor said. "And by the way, it was fun seeing the look in your face every time those electric shocks went through you head. I almost couldn't stop myself from flicking the switch one time too many."

  #

  I was loaded into the back of a van, dumped on the floor so I could feel every bump on the way. It was hours before it stopped and the doors opened.

  It was night and the air was freezing. The starlight was pretty clear, as were the shadows and silhouettes, like that arm flying down, the fist on the end of it around the syringe, stabbing it into my thigh.

  It felt like my muscles were being torn apart when the plunger was hammered home.

  After that they grabbed my feet and dragged me out into the open, smashing my head on the ground.

  I was hauled to my feet, and there, between these tiny little hills, was that bubble of light again. Only this tim
e I got a good look of what was inside it. The whole thing looked like it was made out of thick green glass.

  The craft tilted as it hovered above the ground. Then he stepped around the side of it and I saw him.

  Mrs. Andresen lit a cigarette and smiled.

  "Orthon!" she called holding out her hand, "this is Sean. Sean, this is Orthon. Sean used to be a human."

  Orthon bowed to her and I could see that he had never aged in sixty plus years. He kissed Andresen's hand.

  After that they tore my clothes off and stuffed me into a shiny one piece suit complete with ox-blood colored shoes, the likes of which you have never seen, as I watched Orthon changing before my very eyes, even as he was lifting the camera telling me to smile.

  "A Box Brownie," he said, "the same as the original."

  He held up a picture.

  "This is one we took earlier," he said.

  I looked at it.

  I was twenty four, with a high forehead and extended jaw line. I wouldn't have looked out of place walking down the street, on their planet anyway.

  "Interplanetary trafficking," Mrs. Andresen said. "Don't you just love it?" she squealed scrunching up her nose in delight.

  They were just about to hustle me onboard when she called out, "Wait!" as she if she'd remembered something important at the very last minute.

  She opened her black patent purse and took something out.

  Skipping over to me, she pealed the paper backing off a red No Smoking decal that she'd extracted from purse, slapped it on my right shoulder and patted it down a few times to make sure it stuck.

  "Welcome to the No Fun Zone," she said scrunching up her nose at me again before skipping back over to Orthon.

  #

  They strapped me down inside the craft.

  "There can be a bit of a jolt when it takes off," she said.

  And I couldn't care less anyway seeing I was so drugged. I didn't even realize where I was until I looked out one of the portholes and saw Mrs. Andresen waving, Orthon by her side

  Funny thing was he almost looked like the guy in the picture in the forged passport I had used.

  Still, some people would pay a high price to experience this kind of shit, I thought as everything went dark.

  Then there was nothing but stars and streaks of light outside.

  But what good is money when you're stuck in utopia and you can have anything you want without needing to pay for it?