Mission

by Patrick Tilley

The Man eyed me indulgently then took Miriam’s hand. ‘I know how you feel. I spent thirty-four years in the boiler room myself. What is it you were going to ask me?’

  ‘It may be something I missed,’ she said, ‘but at this point in time, whatever that means, are your people still looking for you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In the end, we decided it was better to let the search continue just in case I got into a jam somewhere along the line and needed help. There was always the chance that one of our ships might pass through my time-frame.’

  ‘And ‘Brax and his baddies are on their heels,’ she concluded.

  ‘Yes. And in some cases, ahead of them.’

  I began to put the pieces together inside my head. It was incredible. While the foursome behind us continued their review of W. Allen’s unique brand of movie magic, and a fat-fingered man on my right reacted with monosyllabic compassion to a tale of woe from a redheaded dancer whose show had just bombed on Broadway, The Man had casually revealed that he was the subject of the biggest man-hunt ever.

  As the sky beyond the Hudson River began the slow mix through from evening into night, and the windows of the black paper cut-out city began to glitter like boxed constellations of cut-rate stars, opposing fleets of metaphysical spaceships fashioned by powers in universes beyond our own were playing a cosmic game of tag through the woven strands of Time. Travelling through the unnumbered centuries towards the beginning and the end of the world in search of The Man who sat beside us cradling a glass of Seagrams.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Miriam. ‘Does this mean that all those flying saucers people claim to have seen are real? Are they – ’ Her hesitation was understandable. ‘Are they looking for you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and now there was no hint of a smile. ‘They’re not really full of little green men, or shaped like trash can lids but, as in the case of angels, people see what they want to see.’

  ‘Now it begins to make sense,’ I said, warming to one of my favourite subjects. ‘Why the sightings are so brief, and the descriptions so varied. Why there aren’t any good pictures, no real attempt to communicate with us, or meet us face-to-face. We are of no interest. They’re just passing through.’

  It all seemed to fit neatly into the pattern of saucer sightings I’d read about, and the theories that UFOs came from another dimension. Another plane of existence. Or from the depths of human consciousness. Didn’t they often appear quite suddenly, hover briefly over an area, a vehicle, or plane, then accelerate to speeds of thousands of miles an hour, and vanish into thin air?

  If ‘Brax’s ships had followed in the wake of the Star of Bethlehem boys, or maybe moved ahead of them, it would explain the steady increase in reported UFO sightings in the last half of this century while at the same time disposing of most of the aerial mysteries recorded by the scribes of Sumer, King Tut, and from there on up. The Man had now made three trips up the line, and two back down. And had doubtless appeared to people on the way. If either side had picked up his trail, it was obvious that they would eventually narrow their search down to the right century, then the right decade, then gradually zero in on the right year until they had his exact location spotted.

  Right here in Manhattan, within an arm’s length of L. Resnick.

  I finished the last of my bourbon. ‘I’ve understood everything so far,’ I began. ‘But something puzzles me. I can grasp the concept of temporal instability and your return to related time-frames of first-century Jerusalem. Because, in a sense that’s where your temporal roots are. But if you are not in total control of your movements, why is it you keep coming back here?’

  My question made Miriam snort in disgust. I don’t know why. The answer concerned her just as much as it did me. As we both discovered later.

  ‘Leo,’ he said, ‘at the moment, I can’t tell you. But when I find out, you’ll be the first to know.’

  For some reason that sounded more like a threat than a promise. And it led me to consider the ever-present threat of the Apocalypse which was the scriptural corollary of the Second Coming and the gloomy prediction I’ve mentioned before, that the final holocaust would begin in the hills of Hebron. As it certainly would if The Man ever went back there as an official guest of the Israeli government. And it struck me that maybe I was wrong. Maybe ‘Brax might arrange to have Manhattan taken out after all. With détente a dead duck, the world in turmoil and Pentagon re-writing its nuclear war strategy, it could happen. The bad news in Revelations could begin with a pre-emptive strike by ‘Brax to take out The Man to whom I had unwittingly become host. He had assured me that his coming here was an accident. But suppose he wasn’t levelling with me? Suppose this was it – with a capital I-T? The good guys might win in the end but what good would it do us to be on the side of the angels?

  I took my eyes off the bottom of my glass and gave him a sideways glance. He broke off his conversation with Miriam and looked at me with disarming directness. He pointed at my glass and pulled one of my five dollar bills out of his hip pocket.

  ‘You look as if you could do with another drink. Let me get you one.’ He flagged the waiter as if he’d been doing it all his life. ‘Miriam …?’

  ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to get back to the hospital.’ She checked her watch. ‘Maybe I can catch up with you later.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you and let you know what’s happening.’

  She waved us back into our seats as she got to her feet. ‘Take good care of him,’ she said.

  I nodded obediently. She gave me a smile that spelt forgiveness but her eyes told me I was still on probation. As she moved past The Man she briefly took hold of his raised hand. ‘You must come to the hospital some time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  We watched her walk away across the room. She turned and gave a quick wave as she reached the line of people waiting for seats. Then she was gone.

  ‘Nice girl …’ He drained his glass as the waiter arrived.

  ‘Very,’ I said, quietly appalled at the prospect of what the New York press would make of the miracles he might perform in Emergency. I put my glass on the tray and looked up at the waiter. ‘Make mine a triple …’

  Chapter 7

  We sipped our way leisurely through the second round and I pointed out some of the more interesting items that formed part of the cityscape below us. The bar faces west, with a shorter window on the north side, so to see the Empire State, the Chrysler Building and the other high-risers of Lower Manhattan you have to eat in the restaurant that occupies the other half of the forty-fourth floor. Even so, The Man was still knocked out by the sheer volume of the city; the densely packed piles of masonry we’d managed to cram on to an island that had been purchased for a row of beads. As well he might be. First-century Imperial Rome might be a jaw-dropper to your average Visi-Goth but nothing short of the Celestial City itself could have prepared him for the glittering spectacle of night-time New York.

  When we’d finished, we left the Gulf and Western building, cut through to Broadway and down to Times Square. As usual, it was littered with folks in search of a good time. Shoals of eager minnows with darting eyes; their faces rainbow-tinted by the razzle-dazzle from the acres of neon graffitti that hung in the night sky without visible means of support. The fluorescent icons of the good life. And in their wake, came the night people with walled-up eyes. The hustlers, pimps and pushers, moving coolly through the minnows like razor-toothed pike. Waiting for a chance to score.

  We plunged into the crowds that spilled off the sidewalk, pausing every now and then to look at the displays in the jam-packed entrances to the pleasure palaces, the fast-food joints and record stores, then we stood for a while on a street corner and watched the world go by.

  It is, perhaps, a banal remark, but it really is fascinating to watch the behaviour of individuals in a crowd. Some move purposefully, others aimlessly. Letting the waves of people carry them back and forth along the sidewalk; like uprooted seaw
eed caught in the ebb and flow of an incoming tide. Longing for a chance encounter to leaven the emptiness of their lives but not daring to reach out to one another. Just wandering; hands in pockets, or folded out of sight under their arms. Like multiple amputees; crippled by the fear of rejection. Their days and nights spent on the fringe of life, waiting for something to happen. Watching the takers. The minnows, jostling for a share of whatever was up for grabs. Sex, thrills, laughter; or drugs to deaden the need for all three.

  Traffic flowed past. A rumbling glass and metal river of reflections. Pushers moved upstream against the press of the crowd; muttering the menu of the Paradise Café: Coke, Hash, Speed, Smack, Poppers, Acid …

  I watched one of them until he disappeared in a sea of featureless faces; drained of colour by the canopies of white neon that reached out over the sidewalk, like bleached grains of sand on a distant shore and I was conscious of a degree of detachment that I had never felt before. As if he was making me watch the world through his eyes but with the knowledge of my own past pursuits of pleasure. And it bothered me more than a little to think that he might know exactly how I had behaved on those occasions. Even though he had never offered a word of criticism, the thought of any form of censure suddenly made me feel rebellious. After all, I had never pretended to be perfect.

  I conjured up what I hoped was an air of aggressive unrepentance. ‘Do you want to move on – or have you seen enough?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Give me the full ten-dollar tour.’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘But don’t hold me responsible.’

  I steered him across Broadway and down towards 42nd Street and made sure he kept close behind me as we eased our way through the log-jam on the corner. The street itself was teeming with people of every race and colour. United by a single creed; the exploitation and gratification of human desire. Maybe I’m neurotic but, when I walk down either side of that block between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, I always experience a certain frisson. Maybe it’s because of the higher-than-average number of blacks and Puerto-Ricans gathered in rap-squads along the curb – as if in readiness to repel boarders. Maybe it’s because, by some miracle, I’d never yet been mugged but at the back of my mind I knew that sooner or later it had to happen. Preferably sooner; while one still has the sense not to resist and the strength to get up. It isn’t a problem now, but the one thing I dreaded was the prospect of shlepping my bones around for seventy crime-free years only to fall prey to a twelve-year old vandal and his kid sister.

  Perhaps my fear was a lurking remnant of my Jewishness. A racememory of pogroms past, or a touch of the guilts about a society that enabled me to live in style while others slept six to a room in cold water walk-ups. Or whatever. All I know is that some of the people who eye you on that street are really evil-looking bastards.

  And there’s another kind, that look as if they’ve just crawled out from underneath a rock; the kind it’s hard to imagine walking the streets in broad daylight. Graduates from Dracula’s Charm School. When I see them, I always ask myself – what the fuck do they do? How do they earn a living? I wouldn’t even offer them a job in our mail room for fear they’d give our clients gangrene through licking the flaps on the envelopes. Maybe they do nothing; just exist on food stamps and welfare. Maybe some of them are even beyond that.

  We stopped and looked into a bar drenched with blood-red light. Four topless go-go dancers stood on a ledge above the bottles of booze and worked the fat off their hips with the help of some funky rock. Their faces frozen behind masks of make-up; their unseeing eyes focussed on infinity. Below them, the bartenders dispensed drinks with a staggering indifference.

  ‘It’s a local custom,’ I said, as we regained the street.

  The Man nooded. ‘They had the same kind of thing in Rome. Only the music wasn’t so loud.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Just passing through …’

  We moved on and, before I could grab him, he stepped inside a bookstore retailing hardcore magazines and fun things for fetishists. I took a deep breath and plunged in after him. My one big worry was that he might go ape and start busting up the place; like when he overturned the tables of the money-lenders inside the Temple. But as it turned out, he was on his best behaviour. He just eyed everything with a kind of bewildered amusement. I’d seen enough of the product not to be shocked but, even so, some of the stuff on display was pretty dreadful.

  And somehow, very sad.

  The defiant full-frontal had come of age about the same time as I had, but years of over-exposure had dulled my initial delight at being afforded sharp focus close-ups of the female pudenda. How many trees, I wondered, had been killed to provide the paper to print all this junk? How did little girls who had skipped to school, stared wide-eyed at their first snowflake, posed prettily in pig-tails and their first party-dress, had known the joy of a kitten, the magic of fairy tales and Santa Claus – how did they end up fingering their private parts in front of a camera? What was the process of dissolution? The answer had to be more than just one hundred bucks an hour.

  I glanced along the racks of magazines. Row upon row of full-page pictures of what the trade called ‘split beavers’. The Temples of Venus that had served as Muse to generations of ardent poets; inspiring them to produce lambent sonnets that had caused ladies to blush and virgins to swoon, along with more robust rhyming couplets such as those found in Eskimo Nell. It was a magnificent obsession; but there was little poetry to be found in the explicit anthologies on offer which, when isolated from the attendant anatomy, bore a depressing resemblance to the unstuffed gizzards of Thanksgiving turkeys.

  I turned to The Man. ‘Not a pretty sight.’

  ‘It never was,’ he replied.

  I took him by the arm. ‘Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.’

  We went out into the street and wandered on. Wherever we looked, it was more of the same. Finally, we ended up in front of a Broadway movie theatre where they were screening Deep Throat. There was a small crowd gathering in front of the box office in readiness for the next performance.

  The Man ran his eyes over the front-of-house display then eyed me. ‘Do we have time to take in a movie before Miriam comes off duty?’

  ‘We do,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t it. We can go to one of the places on Third Avenue.’ I took hold of his arm.

  He didn’t move. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Enough is enough. You saw that stuff in the bookstore. This is the film of the book. You don’t need to watch this kind of thing. You already know we’re sick. It will only upset you.’

  ‘Leo,’ he said, ‘I’ve been around for a long time. For a lot longer than you can possibly imagine. People now aren’t any different from what they were two thousand years ago. Only the scenery is new. Besides, what harm can it do me? Your head’s still in one piece, and you’ve seen it three times.’

  I felt myself go red with embarrassement. ‘True. But that was years ago.’

  Some of you who haven’t seen the movie are probably familiar with its reputation. But for those people who preferred to pass by on the other side I should perhaps explain that with this particular work, skinflicks came of age. Its screening caused a minor sensation and a polarisation of opinion among committed liberals in the same way that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia following the ‘Prague Spring’ of ’68 caused a split between Euro-Communists and hardline Stalinists. Deep Throat is not a movie that invites interpretation. It has all the subtlety of a visit to a slaughterhouse.

  Despite my whispered protests, The Man joined the line and blew the last of my loan on two tickets. After that, there was nothing to do but follow him inside; which I did with some misgiving.

  You may have guessed that, despite my triple exposure to the unique talent of Ms Linda Lovelace, this was not my all-time favourite movie and certainly not one I would have chosen as an introduction to the art of the cinema. But there wa
s no doubt that it told The Man where a goodly number of our heads were at. As I mentioned earlier on, Miriam was into Fassbinder, Varda, Wertmuller, Kurosawa and Antonioni. The last time I’d seen this kind of picture was five or six years ago. The magic, you might say, had worn off.

  We found a couple of seats on the aisle and, as we settled in, I wondered why he’d decided to put me on the spot like this. I’ve got a certain amount of chutzpah but I didn’t have the brass neck to sit through this particular movie in the company of Jesus without feeling uncomfortable. And he knew that. I could only be because he wanted to teach me something.

  The house lights dimmed and I found myself praying for another black-out to hit the East Coast. I waited but, by the end of the main title, I realised that God and his son were ganging up on me.

  It goes without saying that the whole sorry experience was coloured by the presence of The Man but, looking back, I believe it only heightened my objectivity; the feeling of detachment that had invaded me while standing with him on the street corner. My perception of the city, the people, of life itself, had changed; sharpened; become less – worldly? Whatever it was, I knew that there was no going back. I had not yet found The Way but The Man had gently coaxed me to take an irrevocable step forward. And as we watched Ms Linda take an incoming round whilst massaging her gums on the pillared flesh of a second faceless studio buck, I could not help but reflect on the tawdriness of the spectacle and the spiritual poverty of the performers and producers. The explicitness of the farmyard action, the total lack of ennobling emotion and the baseness of the motivation behind its conception suddenly seemed to epitomise the mind-shrivelling nihilism that underpinned the permissive society.

  Like Conrad’s hero, I had journeyed towards the heart of darkness only to recoil before it engulfed me. Perhaps out of an instinct of self-preservation. For it was not only the leaden exhaust fumes, industrial wastes, aerosols and oil-slicks that were polluting the wafer-thin life envelope that was wrapped around our planet. It wasn’t only our bodies that were at risk. Our minds were in danger of slow death by suffocation on the glutinous quicksand of homogenised porn that now covered the Western world. Pricks, beavers and over-blown jugs had become the graven images of the new religion, and sex-shops its shrines.