The bell dinged on the elevator.
“Our carriage awaits,” Adrian said, gesturing towards the elevator.
“You don’t have to be so damned at peace with this!” Klepsky barked.
“I don’t live in the same world of white hats and black hats as you, Klepsky. My world is just one big gray scale. The shade of gray I’m in right now is positively neutral compared to what’s out there.”
Adrian headed towards the elevator, forcing Klepsky to follow if he wanted to keep playing the part of the angel on his shoulder.
The elevator crawled upwards, with no shortage of sound effects suggesting imminent collapse.
“You can bet on any other day this thing just rockets to the top. It’s being weighed down by my conscience,” Klepsky bellyached.
“You’re not going to upstage him in his final moments are you, being such a drama queen?”
“Maybe we could use the time to think our way out of this lockbox of a situation.” He ran his eyes over the elevator’s interior. “No play on words intended.”
Facing the doors, he threw Klepsky a glance, like flicking a whip. “You want to risk the whole world to save one man? Now who’s being ridiculous?”
“We don’t know that. The Unkillable Man could be the answer we all need for a brighter future. That would make us the bad guys in this scenario, which is what it feels like right now.” Klepsky mumbled the last part.
“I suppose you have a point, Klepsky. Sure, the unkillable people would likely all be soldiers at first. But eventually that tech will bleed out to the rest of us, lead to a race of immortals.”
“If you heard how my bones pop in the morning like 4th of July firecrackers, you’d realize what a hot idea that is.”
Adrian noticed the funhouse mirror motif was following him to the top of the building in the form of their reflections off the brass doors. “The Buddhist meditators say they’ve discovered a world of warring gods, comprised of superheroes and supervillains that war endlessly with their god-like powers. Not sure if they live forever there or not, but you get the idea.”
“You have a point you’re trying to make, Adrian, just make it, because my mind is too guilt-stricken right now to ponder profound matters with any clarity.”
“My point is that the tech doesn’t mean much if the consciousness that comes with it is still stuck in the gutter somewhere.”
“We’re talking self-empowerment tech, Adrian. Hard to not feel a little brighter and cheerier and grateful to be alive when you feel like you’re on top of the world.”
“Fair enough. So you think the world is ready for an unkillable man, do you?”
A beat. “Hell no. Not until these self-serving republicans die off. They would just have us live forever to keep building their yachts for them, a class of little people, of serfs, for all eternity.”
A splash of silence exposed the grating elevator chains. “I look at it like this,” Adrian said. “If an idea is meant to be, there’s nothing I or anyone else can do to keep it from coming into being. If they could, they would, and that would be that. If it weren’t me, it’d be somebody else. But when the time’s right, all the backwards looking, content to keep the future forever at bay people, won’t be able to do a damned thing about it.”
Klepsky snorted. “Suppose you’re right. You’re such a moderate. You could stand to be a little more of a visionary like this guy.”
He glanced at the elevator panel. “Oh, shit. This is a private elevator. In that case, we should have been there an hour ago. Maybe the old man in the lobby’s cranking the wheel to get us up to the top.”
“Well, he had to finish mopping the floor first. Not like you didn’t do your part to hold us up.”
The one-chortle joke managed to lighten the mood for both of them a tad.
The elevator finally made it to the Ray Bright floor. Before the doors would open, a scan of their faces was done and their mugs popped up on the screen, along with their names and the fact that they were with the FBI-FD.
“Maybe if it doesn’t like what it sees, the elevator cord snaps, sending us on our merry way to oblivion,” Klepsky said deadpan.
“Would explain why it didn’t do the scan in the lobby. Beats the hell out of an attack dog you have to walk with a pooper-scooper.”
“Ah, the damn scanner is probably just on its way out like the rest of the elevator.”
As the doors parted, the first thing Adrian thought was that Ray Bright really lived up to his name.
The bright, even illumination of the flat, of course, was meant to point up the graphic artwork on the walls. He was evidently quite the mural painter and graffiti artist. Probably how he’d gotten his start with “urban renewal.” And probably how he’d made his initial fortune, figuring out how to turn the same idea into lining the walls of fancy buildings in the financial district and throughout the rest of the haughtier districts in cities all over the country and the world.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Bright said, dressed in his jeans, and paint-splattered tee-shirt and bare feet. He was in the middle of doing another mural. “If you’ve come to steal from me, I’m afraid there’s really nothing you can stick in your pocket.”
Klepsky and Adrian glanced at one another, realizing that Bright hadn’t bothered to check the security feature on the elevator, and so had no idea who had barged in on him.
“No, no, wouldn’t think of it,” Klepsky, said, fingering the artwork that, for now, were just sketches on really big sheets of paper lying over a drafting board. “We’ve come to kill you.”
“Really? No shit!” Bright sounded genuinely surprised, but not shocked enough to interrupt his painting. Artists at work, I tell ya.
Adrian was still admiring the art, going from painting to painting along the walls. He kept studying the masterpieces from different distances. To his surprise, they revealed new secrets from various positions and angles, like one of those picture puzzles he was fond of filling in with crayons when he was a kid.
“Maybe if you could tell us something about yourself worth killing you over,” Adrian coaxed, “to help us feel better about it.”
“Hmm, let’s see…” Bright sounded as if he was racking his mind as best he could in between putting the final brush strokes on his latest mural on the floor. Hunched over it the way Adrian imagined Jackson Pollock painted his large canvases. Ray Bright painted nearly as feverishly, but he wasn’t exactly throwing paint willy-nilly from paint cans. He was using one of several brushes, simultaneously.
“I J-walk every chance I get. I love seeing people jump out of their skin thinking they’re going to hit me. It’s about the only time I see them fully in the moment. The rest of the time their eyes look lost, as if something’s feasting on their souls.”
Klepsky and Adrian exchanged knowing looks. “Keep going,” Klepsky said. “You aren’t exactly getting warm.”
Bright missed the beat, still a little too absorbed with his painting to save his life, or perhaps end it, if he managed to burp up the wrong piece of trivia about himself.
“I was accused of statutory rape once,” he said finally. “I was seventeen. She was thirty-five. The love of my life, actually.” As before, he talked without looking up from his painting.
“Now she’s serving ten years in prison.”
“You seeing anyone else?” Klepsky asked.
“Why would I? I told you, I was in love. What’s ten years? I’ll still be young. Her beauty will likely have faded like so many of my murals out on the streets. But her beauty was never what drew me to her.”
“Finish your painting. Make it count,” Adrian said.
“There, all done.” Bright stood up straight to admire his handiwork, then climbed up a ladder to admire it more from a far better angle.
“What do you think?” he said.
Adrian and Klepsky both came closer to take in the art piece lying on the floor like a throw rug. “Nice work,” Klepsky said.
Bright descended th
e ladder to take it in alongside them, making sure this vantage point worked every bit as well as the one from high above.
“It’s magnificent.” Adrian turned Bright’s chin towards him. He looked at Adrian only reluctantly. “Maybe you could help with your murder? Something suitably artistic. It would be a shame not to go out the way you lived.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, his tone a mix of emotions, the first sign of shock and belief setting in. He ran his hand through his long hair, getting paint caught up in it, before setting down the last of the brushes and wiping his hands on his tee shirt.
He padded over to the drafting table with the big sheets of white paper. “Are you guys trying to broadcast this, or keep it more of a secret?” Again more with the mixed tone, more concern leeching in to his voice than before. But just a bit.
“Secret,” Klepsky said, too ashamed to do it any other way.
“Let’s telecast it,” Adrian said. “Your style is bright and bold. Any other kind of death wouldn’t be true to you.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Bright said, his tone getting gradually darker, one gray hue at a time. But that mighty spirit of his was just too formidable. Adrian knew that when the reality fully set in, it still wouldn’t break him.
Bright did some rapid drawings on the drafting table, working nearly as fast as Adrian had seen computer printers render 3D sculptures. But his movements were a lot less mechanical, and a lot more full of life.
“Are we talking gruesome, say, Heads Severed by Theodore Gericault, or more surreal, Salvador Dali-like?” Bright asked, sounding genuinely concerned about getting the stylistic rendering right.
“It should scream Ray Bright, whatever you go with,” Adrian said, “not some other famous painter.”
“Is this some random murder? Something done on a dare? Context matters,” Bright said, now trying to cover his earnest desire to get the painting right with his genuine fear. He was starting to shiver.
Klepsky politely turned the heat up in the apartment for him.
“You’re dying so millions might live in peace, and in a worry-free, stable tomorrow,” Adrian said.
“We’re futurists,” Klepsky explained, “for the FBI.” He flashed his badge. “Killing you is vital if we’re going to keep the world headed in the direction of a future we can all live with, even if no one finds it particularly perfect.”
“And your idea of a less-than-perfect future, but one that is at least livable?” Bright coached, “Are we talking Philip K. Dick? George Orwell? Aldous Huxley?”
“Trust me, pal. We already have that future,” Klepsky said. “We’re hoping for one a little better.”
“Okay,” Bright said, sounding something other than convinced.
“And what’s better for you?” he asked, as he threw some more ideas up on the drafting board, sketching them out rapidly.
“I’m a transhumanist myself,” Adrian confessed. “Zoltan Istvan for president. I voted for him in 2016. He’ll win one day, I’m sure of it.”
Ray Bright smiled, brightening. He nodded. “That’s a good future. I can do that.”
The drawings brought to life quickly various takes on a future Adrian was surprised to find he couldn’t wait to get to. But something told him they would never come. Not so much on account of the likes of people like him, but on account of the fact that the world wasn’t filled yet with dreamers like Ray Bright. They were still in a minority. But one day they wouldn’t be. That’s the future they would have then.
“Can I ask how it is I have so much impact on the future?” Ray asked.
“Our killer picked you,” Klepsky said. “If I had to guess, because you were a light in the darkness. He prefers the dark places. And because he knew it would fuck with us having to kill someone that was doing so much good for the world at a time when so many people were doing so many bad things to it.”
A tear trickled down from Bright’s right eye. “Thanks for that. For acknowledging that I’m making a difference. Sometimes I wonder.”
Each of the latest drawings cut into Adrian like a knife plunged clear to the hilt. This guy should be one of the ones engineering the future, not painting it, if he had visions jumping out of his head like this. World after world materialized before Adrian’s eyes that even in the form of the thinnest of sketches all looked a hell of a lot better than anything he could imagine for humanity. All he had to do was flesh out one of them, stick it up against the wall as his latest mural, and pose his body within the vista to be metaphorically reborn into a much better world. Maybe that’s how they’d play it, Adrian thought; it ought to go some distance to placating the voices in his head deafening him with their protests.
He had this one drawing with this sexy femme fatale robot sitting across the table from Ray, playing chess. Despite no attempts being made to hide her robot status, no self-respecting heterosexual male could possibly concentrate on the chess game.
Another tableau took a succession of three panels, like in a graphic novel, to properly bring the scene to life. In the first one a dragon was soaring after a flying human and blasting a bolus of flames at him. In the second panel, the enhanced human had taken the hit and was falling out of the sky, only to heal halfway to the ground in the third panel to fire back energy beams emitted from each of his finger-tips at the dragon. It took all three panels to reveal that they were actually playing with one another, gleefully.
But each of these futures required crisp rendering, a kind of superrealism to sell the more real than real-life angle that was so important to Ray Bright’s message. And even with his quick-draw skills, Adrian didn’t see even the one-panel paintings being done in time in full color to those kinds of specifications.
It was time to step in.
“I hate to put a crimp on genius, but it should be a killing we can pull off readily with what’s at hand,” Adrian instructed. “And in the next few minutes.”
“Yeah, yeah, duh.” Bright flipped the page over, sounding as if he was genuinely chastising himself. Glanced around his apartment for inspiration. The high ceilings. The wide open spaces. The rooms off to the side looked nearly as big from what Adrian could see.
“Maybe pick the room with the most artwork, with your favorite pieces,” Adrian suggested. “We can hang you from the ceiling and see that you’re still spinning slowly when the cops come in. That way it can look like you were admiring your best works and thinking they still didn’t live up to what you’d hoped to do. You say you were wondering if you were really making a difference. Maybe a line or two that would explain the suicide, though it may not be necessary, just from the staging.”
“Adrian!” Klepsky’s shout was a reprimand.
“No, no, I like it,” Bright said. “It’s how I might well go out, if you caught me on an off night. I always imagined if I got arthritis, or lost my sight, and somehow couldn’t continue to paint… Age has no shortage of ways for taking what we artists love most from us…”
“You don’t have dark days though, not so long as you can paint,” Adrian said, making a study of his face.
Bright looked up at him, feeling naked. “No,” he finally confessed.
“I know the feeling,” Adrian said. “Getting lost in your work is how a lot of us chase the demons away.”
Adrian and Klepsky reprised their guilty looks at one another.
Bright finished the sketch. “I have the chain and collar in the next room. I once hung a naked cadaver in just that spot, rotating, eyes forever wide at my canvases, mouth wide too, like Edward Munch’s, The Scream. Actually, his hands were at his mouth as well, being as the idea was to parody Munch. It was quite the hit at the party. Of course, if I reenact the drama, people will think I was pleading for help all along and no one thought to offer.”
“Never miss the chance to make other people feel uncomfortable, I say,” Klepsky said, slapping Bright’s back. “We’ll do it just like that.”
“That way they can think about living more in the moment,” Adr
ian said, “like those people you’re forever cutting in front of in traffic.”
Bright nodded. “I like it.” He wiped back a few more tears.
“Oh, shit, we nearly forgot the best part,” Klepsky said. “You get to come back from the dead. We’re going to inject you with something that’s probably going to feel worse than the fluids they shoot people on death row up with. It’ll dissolve you as if you were soaking in a vat of lye. But then the reaction will reverse, and you’ll resolidify, and come back from the dead.”
Bright was staring at them nonplused for the first time. Strangely, it was the first thing either of them had said that didn’t make sense to him. That sounded stark, raving mad. Adrian was ashamed for what that said about the world they lived in, and the world they were speeding towards. That a visionary like this could get it so wrong.
“The important thing is, you’ll live through it, and go on to live a normal life,” Klepsky said, his tone trying to emphasize the positive along with his words.
“But will I be able to paint?”
Klepsky shifted his eyes from Bright to Adrian, and then back again, slowly. “I honestly don’t know. But people have lost their arms and learned to paint with their feet. If you’re determined enough, you’ll find a way.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Bright said half-heartedly.
Klepsky patted Bright on the back some more. “Now, what’s say we get that hangman’s chain?”
“Is there any point, after what you just said?”
Klepsky shrugged. “To be honest, we don’t have the best record with reanimations. So it’s good we planned for the worst.”
Time telescoped for Adrian from there. He just remembered getting the collar and the chain around Bright’s neck. Hoisting him up until he was dangling off the ground by nearly the full height of a man. The pulley had helped, when Klepsky refused to take things further. Adrian pulled at the choke collar, Ray’s mouth gasping like a fish as Adrian held the line until he could fasten it to one of the designer chairs. There was barely any furniture in the place except for the marvelous designer easy chairs you could recline in to appreciate the paintings. Adrian tried to focus on the vanity of the situation to get him through this.
Unkillable Page 22