Revolution

by Michael Sutherland

  "Will you help me?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

  I slumped down on a stool at the kitchen table.

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

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

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

  "Tell me about it," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I could feel bad memories crawling under my skin.

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

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

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

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

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

  I shook my head. "No."

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

  "Yes."

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

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

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

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

  I jerked up my head.

  "He told you that?" I asked.

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

  The eagle had landed on a sea of tranquility.

  And I felt sick at a stranger’s memory.

  #

  I left with my hat in my hand.

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

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

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

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

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

  It was time.

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

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

  The shop front lights blinked out as I walked by.

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

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

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

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

  Damned absinthe; I should have known better.

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

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

  I didn’t look back.

  Every kneipe was a basement, every floor inside was potholed with craters and ripped lino. I squeezed my way through der nacht auf der untoten and staggered into each gantry in turn.

  Boats, quays, harbors, marinas I had to remind myself. This is Hanseatic country with canals as big as the Grand Canyon and ships as big as the Taj Mahal.

  The city was an industry on the waves and I was bobbing along on its rapids in a little rubber dingy that bashed me around every twisted bend.

  I had one point on a map, one dead kid to find alive, seven million suspects, and nothing was happening until I came to the place without windows.

  It had no name.

  It had no sign.

  It looked like a red brick mausoleum with one big door that was thick with black paint. And it was in the kid’s notebook.

  "One, two, three, here goes."

  You’d think I was getting ready to be launched on the back of a doodlebug into outer space.

  I reached out, bit my lip and held my breath.

  I touched the door. And when I didn’t drop dead I pushed it open wide.

  Optics glittered at me like chrome lasers. It was the same with the mirrors. I stepped inside, let go of the hatch, and heard the only emergency exit squeeze itself shut behind me with a click.

&nb
sp; I strolled up to the bar as an orchestra of zithers sliced through a squeezebox mentality.

  I gave my best shot at not falling flat on my face as I swayed under a glitter-ball revolving in a haze of cigar smoke trapped at the ceiling.

  Did I need a beer?

  And before the barman could jabber on about which one I wanted, I pointed at bottles leaning together on the sagging shelf behind him. I kept saying ja ja ja louder and louder until his long creepy fingers touched the one that glowed at me the brightest. And when he did, the glow died.

  Not a good sign.

  He popped the cap with a Coke opener chained to his belt and dumped the foaming bottle in front of me. He marked the placemat, and I took it, and the beer, with me and slid off to the cover of a dark corner.

  The patrons were either barefaced skinheads, or they were handle-bar mustached, hairy and full of last week’s sweat. Their voices yelled and fell and dulled the more I drank.

  Is there lightning in here or is it me? I thought.

  I turned to see the tail end of a greatcoat sweep through the crowd and vanish under the mezzanine at the back. A mezzanine where biceps flexed and leathered crotches bulged through the gaps in the balustrade.

  There was be a full on light explosion from nowhere, and a flicker that echoed into nothing before I could find the source.

  I was packing my Polaroid sunglasses but I would have looked obvious if I’d put them on.

  I thought I was being intelligent.

  Flash. Flicker.

  What the hell was that?

  The light was so bright it bleached the flesh around me to bone-white translucent.

  No one else seemed to notice but every time the flash hit, my head gave a thud.

  I decided to leave.

  Not by front ways but by back alleyways.

  Eyes crawled over me as I pushed my way through the crowd. I crept into shadows and around baffle-boards hiding a snooker hall at the back of the bar. And with no one there but me the voices behind me faded to nothing.

  I reached out to walls that were pushing in at me on either side. They were soft and warm like pulsating guts and sweat dripped off of them.

  I clumped down wooden steps, my feet slipping.

  There was a stink of burning wires and rancid butter, and it was thick.

  I stopped for a second and heard slow waves suck at the bottom step.

  Something glinted down there and it felt like mucus was oozing over my boots.

  Deciding it was time for the torch, I took it out and flicked on the beam to see that the steps had disappeared into thick black stuff.

  "Bruder," a voice said.

  I squinted at liquid tar from here to eternity.

  The thing rose in a big bubble of black. Only it wasn’t a bubble. It was a head.

  When the torch beam bounced off of it a mouth opened, the eyes opened, and it looked right at me. The whole thing was surrounded by a snot-green halo.

  "Bruder," it said again.

  It rose up more dripping crude oil.

  The fumes were overpowering and my head reeled.

  "Komm zu uns," it said.

  And I wanted to. I really did.

  It waded toward me, its legs sucking up and down through the tar.

  Its hands reached out and a dense streamer of green snaked out of them, then fanned wide like a big mouth, and sucked at my face.

  "Du kommst wir gerade rechts mein kleiner bruder."

  I took a step into the sludge. My legs gave way. It would have been so easy.

  I saw the walls tilt back and the oil tilt up at my face.

  I was falling for a tar baby.

  Mr. Pink my shirt designer won’t be too happy I thought when the collar of my shirt ripped.

  The buttons popped and flew off like shrapnel. From forward to back something had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.

  "Idiot!" the voice said.

  Hands grabbed me under my arms, but I didn’t protest. I couldn’t. Why should I? It felt too good, too easy.

  Before I knew it I was outside lying on the cobbles.

  My head was allowed to rest back and I opened my eyes. Eyes looked back down at me and close.

  "Hi," I grinned.

  The face pulled away and I was yanked back onto my feet.

  "Halt!"

  So they did and me too.

  I recognized the face. The hair was different, shorter. But the face was the same. He had something in his hand. It didn’t look nice.

  Then I could hear the Bren guns; see the bullet tracers, their orange lines firing through the night.

  "Er verstehe nicht," said one of the guys holding me up by the armpits.

  A grenade exploded in a doorway and boots scraped through the carnage of smoke and bricks.

  The explosion brought me around. Everyone dove for cover. Without support I crashed to my knees.

  In the confusion I scrambled for the nearest corner. And there went that flashy flicker light again, bright and white.

  The guy with the gun, with the face I thought I knew, lurched for me. My heels shot out and kicked out Thumper style. His head shot back on impact and the gun flew out of his hand.

  I clawed out for it, but when I did there was acceleration in the pit of my gut. The next thing I knew was the sound of feet hammering down the steps in the cellar to me. I was sprawled, legs akimbo, with gun in hand. I looked up at them, then down to that well of an oil place. There was nothing there now but crates of beer and barrels of Bremen.

  One of the guys hunkered down and looked me in the eyes. Reaching out he took the gun from me as easy as taking a popgun from a kid.

  "Pay-null-acht Luger," he said to someone, but not me. And did I care anyhow?

  He stuffed the gun into his pocket and dragged me to my feet.

  No one said anything until they had me in the street.

  "Sind Sie, okay?"

  "Huh?"

  "Go home, Bruder," another said.

  They walked away and left me there with a torn collar, torn off buttons, busted knees and ruined chinos.

  No cops, no nothing, I staggered back to the hotel and crashed down on the bed.

  #

  I knocked at the front door. No one answered. I knocked harder until the glass broke.

  I stepped over splinters and made my way into the front room. There was nothing there. The father who had claimed he wasn’t a father wasn’t there either. It looked as though no one had been living there in years.

  I made my way to the mother’s house. It was the same thing; nothing and no one there, no pictures, no passports, no cups, and no coffee.

  Three guys were dead and one more nearly so, me.

  #

  I searched through the archives.

  Hamburg 1943.

  I flicked through pictures of destruction, faces of the dead and the dying, and the burnt beyond recognition.

  Bremer Reihe.

  Thule Orientals in green gloves chanting mantras to a machine in some basement under fire. And there were six others standing in the shadows behind them.

  Some people just don’t know when to die.

  I hit print and the print slithered out like a dried up tongue.

  The picture was grainy, but there he was, sitting in some sleazy little kneipe with two young guys on one side of him, one on the other with five shot glasses up front. Someone was missing.

  Take a guess.

  I looked at their faces. I looked at his. They all looked like him, they all looked like her. And I could just tell who was holding the Brownie camera taking the black and whites

  Five glasses and four guys and all of them were waiting for the Prodigal son to return.

  I took the print back home with me. I looked at my face in the mirror.

  If I didn’t know any better I would have said I was looking at my own father or maybe my brother from a different time. An older twin if that was possible; one who didn’t age.

  Something had happened back the
n; something beyond desperation.

  "He’s not mine," he’d said. "Neurologists checked him out," she’d said.

  A big lie, a radio wave from the past to rein me in, something to get me close to where that machine had been, to get me back, to prove to them that the thing actually worked; the right guy in the wrong time to help them all escape from the horror they had created.

  It was dark. I poured a vodka straight. The phone rang. I picked it up.

  "Yeah?"

  But no one talked; just another dead end.

  Einstein. Relativity. Tesla. The Egg of Columbus. The Torsion Tensor Effect. And the Wenceslas mine.

  Und Schutzstaffel, SS General Dr Ing Hans Kammler.

  Mein Vater.

  I looked at his pinched face, his eyes. Black and white didn’t do their evil justice. I just hoped that at least the heels of my boots had.

  They had put me in that machine along with my brothers after I had taken that picture. Alles mein brüder und mich, and now everyone was after me for the sins of my father. Me, the problem paperclip still being sucked back to that magnetron from the past; the aftereffect

  Now their mansions were empty. No traces, no signs, no mother or father to be seen. There never had been, not in this time. That was all they needed though. Their machine was still stuck back there with enough power to reach out with their bait and drag me back into their trap. Enough to have me sucked back and let them know it was safe; me, their own son, their test rat, the only rat who had survived. If I had made it to here and gone back there then maybe they would have been brave enough to use it to save their own skins.

  And destroy the planet.

  The good guys guarding that cellar, where it had all happened in the first place, had saved me. The bad guys were still stuck back there where they belonged. But if they had seeped back through with their influence once, then they could sniff me out again. So I packed the few things I owned and slung a rucksack over my back.

  It was time to move on. Stay long enough anywhere, and they’d home in on me again.

  I took one last look at my reflection. I put on the shades and the light dimmed. I saw my father’s face smile behind me in the mirror. I reached up and yanked down on the light cord and made him disappear back to hell where he belonged.

  I walked out the door, into the night, and down the street, and I didn’t look back.