Revolution

by Michael Sutherland

  Then I began to wonder about how long the boredom would take to set in, how long before I didn't even want to move, to walk, how long it would take before I was praying for a war or a famine to hit for excitement.

  How long would it take me to forget how good it was to be part of a species that was constantly pushing itself towards the edge of destruction?

  How long it would take for the seduction of peace to overwhelm me and forget that I used to be human.

  (First published in Jupiter Science Fiction Magazine, spring 2012)

  THE COLUMBUS MACHINE

  There was green out there somewhere but I didn’t see it.

  I looked at my watch and stepped out of hotel Janus and stared at the tramlines of Bremer Reihe. I crossed empty roads, strode down alleyways and over bridges until I came to the park I’d walked through the night before.

  I made my way to the Rathaus, the former town hall (not a warren for furry little nibblers with yellowed buckteeth) and surveyed the evidence; the printouts they feed to the ever hungry paparazzi. And those paps had been as voracious here as anywhere else on the planet.

  Until the story had died through lack of probable cause.

  There were three victims, all guys, all dead.

  I took out my notebook and plotted where their bodies had been found and joined the dots from Binnen Alster to Steindamm to Kurt Schumacher Allee.

  There had been no signs of a struggle, no bullets, no poison in the veins, no needle tracks and therefore no suspicion of drugs, at least of the intravenous variety.

  And they all appeared to have been in vigorous health right up until life they did part.

  I asked questions.

  People die, they said. Men die, they shrugged. Even young men.

  Sudden Death Syndrome came up more than once, the heart stopping for no reason.

  But each autopsy, or nuttenmörder as they call it, had failed to show evidence of thickening of the heart muscle. There were no structural faults that would have led to deviant irregularities of cardiac rhythm. Nothing in the way of weird electrical activity that would have killed otherwise fit young men stone dead whilst still standing on their feet.

  The victims fitted the profile for SDS I’ll give you that: non-traumatic, non-violent and unexpected. But like women who find themselves pregnant with phantom babies, these guys seemed to have possessed bodies with only phantom life to make them work.

  No one knew who they were because none of them had carried any ID. And with no ID there were no names, no ages, and no links to possible family or friends - nothing.

  A week after the postmortems the drawers of the mortuary freezer were yanked open only to find that the three body bags were now flat and empty, which might go some way to back up the lab’s claims that the tissue and blood samples had reached them full of nothing but sterile air.

  The whole thing was eventually put down to an employee’s sick practical joke.

  The paps got pissed. A guy got sacked. And the guy was found swinging by the neck at the end of a piano wire hanging from the middle of Köhlbrand Bridge.

  #

  "Something killed my son," his mother said.

  "Maybe it was natural causes," I said.

  But she didn’t believe me.

  Neither did I.

  "Why was he in Hamburg anyway?" I asked.

  She sat down and shrugged. She twisted a lace hanky in her veiny hands then dabbed it at her eyes.

  "He was always travelling," she said. "It was as if he was looking for something. For a way back to a place he had hidden deep inside of him. Somewhere that was secret. He said it was like homesickness for something that wasn’t there anymore."

  "Hamburg?" I asked. "It’s not exactly the prime holiday destination of the planet."

  But what did I know?

  "My son wasn’t on holiday," she said. "He was travelling."

  So she kept telling me.

  I nosed around. She was paying. So was her marriage.

  I asked about the dad.

  She jumped up from her armchair like she had been whacked in the spine with an iron bar.

  There was more hand wringing, more hanky twisting, and even more dabbing at the eyes, but not a tear. She always turned away, sniffed at the right moment then whirled back with a wane grimace.

  "The father, the father," she wailed with her arms wind-milling all over the place.

  Apparently she and the kid’s dad were meeting with divorce somewhere over the bridge of spies.

  There had been fights and tantrums, she said. "None of which were my fault, of course."

  "Of course," I said nodding my faux pas agreement.

  Anything for a quiet life.

  You never disagree with your paymaster. And this paymaster had electric transmissions zapping all the way to my bank account; no cash, no checks.

  Any kind of checks.

  And sometimes the amounts she owed me didn’t add up; not exactly to the amounts we’d agreed upon. Even the expenses would be paid a few percent short.

  And I wasn’t a charity.

  She put it down to ethereal problems with commission charges and exchange rates.

  I put it down to another unknown. But whatever it was I just smiled and insisted that, "those are your problems, lady, not mine. Fix it and fix it quick or it’s no deal."

  And like magic it would be done.

  I couldn’t figure her out. She was either the grieving mother whose son had died suddenly and she couldn’t get over it, or she was suffering the kind of paranoid delusions that natural causes don’t fit.

  I didn’t ask.

  I asked the father instead.

  #

  The father shut the door in my face.

  I didn’t budge from the stoop and knocked at his door again, only harder.

  This time the door swung wide and knuckles swept the way into a dingy hallway.

  In no mood to tempt fate that dull day I had decided not to wear a stab-proof vest. Besides I could always duck faster than Sonny Liston if I had to.

  I didn’t have to.

  "It was a heart attack," the father said.

  "How can you tell?" I asked.

  "What else could it be?"

  I didn’t tell him I’d been over that one already.

  There wasn’t even a body; at least not one that belonged to their kid as far as I could tell.

  But I didn’t say it. Why bother?

  The father wasn’t interested anyway.

  Cold-hearted and pinch faced, he was the complete opposite of the mother. Or was he?

  They shared one thing in common though.

  They were both liars.

  The mother’s grieving didn’t feel genuine and neither did the father’s cold acceptance of his son’s death.

  That is if he was dead.

  And if he wasn’t dead then why the hell were they trying to convince me that he was?

  #

  "I’m not a detective," I said to her.

  "But you know things," she said.

  "I’m not psychic either."

  She didn’t believe me.

  "Do you have any of the things he had with him when he was over there?" I asked changing the subject.

  She had a million and one of them.

  She stomped up the stairs ahead of me and opened the door to his room like it had been wired to the mains. She stepped back and I stepped inside. There were boxes and bags full of his stuff; a ton of it. Where would I start?

  She handed me pictures and I sat on the son’s bed and slid one past the other.

  "You only have black and whites of him?" I asked.

  She frowned and bit her lip.

  "We thought it had a more artistic appeal," she said.

  Her smile was about as genuine as a fake Barbie’s.

  "You and his father?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  The word snapped at me like a bite.

  "Unusual," I said.

  As was their son’s a
ttire in the pictures.

  "These look like they were taken sixty years ago," I said holding up a fan of little monochrome squares.

  "We thought it would look quaint," she said. Her voice rose sharply on the last word, like she was slamming the lid shut on Pandora’s Box and nipping the tail of the monster before it could escape.

  "Do you have any of the things he had with him when he was over there?" I asked.

  She stepped around me and I hunkered down on the floor.

  My hands touched boxes and bags. She opened a door in the back wall.

  I stood up. My knees cracked.

  "That’s all there is," she said. "That’s all they said there was."

  "You don’t know what he left with?" I asked.

  "He was twenty-eight years old," she said. "He didn’t live here. He hadn’t for years."

  "I see."

  Or I didn’t.

  There was a passport with no stamps and a notebook with scribbles full of surreal images. And they were badly drawn.

  I flicked through the pages.

  There were better drawings at the back made from a cleaner hand, neater. I flipped the pages back and forth as she hovered over my shoulder.

  "Your son drew these?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "All of them?"

  "Yes, why?" she asked.

  I showed her a drawing from the front, another from the back.

  "How do you account for the difference?" I asked.

  "I can’t," she said with a big plastic grin before she had a chance to neutralize it with an obligatory look of grief. She didn’t seem to possess a great repertoire in the emotions department.

  "He drew sometimes," she said. "That’s all I know."

  "Only sometimes?" I asked.

  Now it was my turn to show genuine emotional intelligence. I couldn’t help the way my eyebrows shot up in disbelief.

  There must have been a hundred pages packed with detailed drawings. What did she mean by "sometimes"?

  She looked at me. Nope, that’s wrong; she scoped me. She studied me like I was a nematode dropped onto a slide and drip fed acid just to see how much of a change in environment I could take. The only difference between me and the worm was I squirmed on the inside.

  "You could frame this and put it in a gallery," I said, pointing to one of her kid’s drawings at the back, "but this?"

  That broke her spell.

  "I don’t understand what you’re getting at," she said.

  "I’m no expert," I said, "but if I had to guess, I would say that these were drawn by two different people. It’s either that or these ones are unimportant and these, the more detailed ones at the back, are. Maybe he’d drawn something he saw when he didn’t have a camera handy, or when he couldn’t use one, or when he was in a place where even a Box Brownie wouldn’t work. You know, like one that only took pictures in black and white."

  Her hand fluttered to her skinny neck.

  "He had a problem," she said before pressing the bunched hanky to her mouth.

  "Is that how you explain these drawings?"

  Monet’s eyes were giving out at the end of his life. By then he could only paint what his soul perceived, and his paintings were more beautiful for it.

  Perhaps that’s what had happened to her kid. He only drew what he could perceive in a certain way; at least a distorted version of it.

  The colors were formless but bright, primary in nature and startling to look at. They were almost coming off the page at me. It was as if he couldn’t actually see the thing he was looking at, the thing that was creating so much brightness.

  And there was something else about them, something that clicked within me, something familiar.

  I turned to look at her just in time to see waterless tears collecting under her eyes.

  "This is why you called me?" I asked holding up a particularly bright image of green.

  She nodded uncertainly and bit her lip. She wasn’t even looking at the drawling, but at me, gauging my reaction.

  "No," she said shaking her head. "I called you because my son has disappeared, and also because he saw things, things that no one else could."

  She looked at me dead center in the forehead.

  "Just like you," she said.

  But I didn’t want to talk about that. Not to her. Not to a stranger. Besides, this was about her son, not me.

  "He put it all down in his drawings," she said pacing up and down the floor, spitting out the words. "Of course his father thought he was mad."

  "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.