Project Antichrist

by Pavel Kravchenko

  “I was wondering where my clothes were. I had a… I had a bottle of pills,” Brome said, eyes watching bandaged penguins and polar bears comradely passing around a bottle of rum after a pretty mean match of football.

  “Your wife took your clothes. I hope she’ll dump them straight away. Torn, dirty all over…” Seeing Brome’s quick glance, the nurse lowered her voice. “Don’t worry. They took the pills out before giving them to her. Everything’s confidential.”

  “I appreciate that. Can you bring them when you get the food, please?”

  “Sorry, no outside medication allowed in the hospital. They’ll give them back to you tomorrow before discharge. But, like I said, not to worry. You didn’t miss anything.” With that squinty grin the nurse nodded at the IV bag. “All right? All right. Be right back.”

  As the door slid back in place behind her, Brome looked up at the drip bag. On TV, the news resumed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It made no sense.

  Still, I thought it over for a minute or two, because lately a lot of things that had sounded like gobbledygook at first became a lot more sensible once I thought them over. In this particular case, however, thinking it over amounted to nothing. I came up with nothing. It simply didn’t make any sense, and coming at the end of Dr. Young’s convincing and at times interesting lecture, this nonsense cast on it a different sort of illumination.

  Iris met my gaze with a distant stare. Dr. Young sat in the chair Iris had occupied earlier, watching me think.

  I was about to give the verdict, but again I got distracted by the question of where we were. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to ask that first. That would allow me additional minute or so to make sure I didn’t look like a fool telling Dr. Young that he needed a doctor himself.

  I opened my mouth, but before the question was formed, the door cracked open and a vaguely familiar blond head peered inside. The youth the head belonged to noted our positions in the room and grinned for some reason.

  “Sleep well?” he inquired. “Come, you have to see this.” Throwing the door open, the kid disappeared. Through the door I saw the pink wall of a vaguely familiar narrow hallway.

  I got up slowly, sending a most quizzical grimace in Dr. Young’s direction, but he only shrugged and pointedly looked at Iris.

  “Don’t ask me,” said Iris in a tone suggesting she was not entirely startled to be asked.

  My confusion lasted only the time it took me to reach the hallway. Once through the door, I recognized it immediately. We were back at the theater-bar, where, aside from the off chance of Dr. Young being of an alternative sexual orientation, only Iris could have brought us. The blond kid must have worked there. He was the guy who had asked me for a smoke while I waited for Paul in the booth.

  The next door on the same side of the hallway was ajar. We entered something like a VIP lounge with a full-size dark green polyester couch, a couple of armchairs, two lagoon-like tables and an aquarium with several long and thick fishes. Fleetingly, I wondered why the hell I had to sleep with knees covering my ears on that loveseat, when there was a couch like that in the next room. The kid, stretched all over one of the armchairs, directed our attention to the screen built into the wall, bookended on both sides by two potted plants.

  They were showing a picture of some square-faced guy, and then suddenly my face appeared. I knew at once something was amiss. I was smiling amiably in all the pictures they showed.

  “…Still no knowledge of his whereabouts right now, but sources tell us Mr. Whales has been known to sleep late,” the female anchor I haven’t met reported with a smirk. “Perhaps he just joined us. If that is the case…” She leaned closer, smirk turning into a warm smile “…come on back, Luke. We’ve missed you.”

  A handsome weatherman agreed. “We certainly have, Joan. And we have even more good news. The next four or five days promise nothing but sunshine…”

  “Wait… what happened?” I asked groggily. My gaze wandered from Iris to Dr. Young to Iris and, finally, to the kid in the chair.

  “They shot the guy who killed your marshal,” the kid said. “The FBI wants you to show up for the statement, but otherwise you have been cleared of all suspicion. Of course, the cops say they never really made you an official suspect in the first place, but everyone knows it’s a pile of crap.”

  I stared him for a long time, then turned and stared at Iris.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  I breathed out a cautious chuckle, suddenly wanting to hug her. She must have seen it in my eyes, because she threw open her arms. I ducked in, wrapped my arms around her and squeezed, lifting her into the air. I could have lifted my old Winger right then with as little effort. The blond kid jumped from his armchair, slapped me on the back and, grinning that suddenly infectious grin, left the room.

  “Mr. Whales, may I have a word with you, before…”

  I put Iris down and turned to Dr. Young, thinking maybe to toss him up a couple of times too. The intense look on his face stopped me. He commanded the TV to shut down, and when that failed, frowned deeply and settled for mute. In the silence I heard a fan in the ceiling, buzzing a nightingale’s song.

  Dr. Young began to talk rapidly and I stood there nodding, but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t catch much of it. Funny how the mind works. I recall him saying something about being calm and rational and not making some mistakes twice. But despite the events of the previous night, despite Lloyd, despite what he had said only five minutes earlier, all I could think of was: I can forget it all and go back.

  “Choice, Mr. Whales,” Dr. Young said after he’d done some talking. “It was not a coincidence that I’ve mentioned choice to you. Don’t let them choose for you.”

  That was one statement that got through to me. It really soured my mood. “Choice, Doc? What choice? I was framed for murder, remember?”

  “You were being framed long before Mr. Freud appeared on the horizon.”

  “So you say. And maybe it’s true, or maybe it isn’t. Regardless, I didn’t get to choose any of it.”

  “You chose to stop the pills.”

  “Stopping pills is one thing.”

  “You chose to be free, instead of ‘fighting for freedom.’ Are you intending to report to your nearest recruitment center now?”

  “No, I’m not. But I don’t need to stay on the run for the rest of my life dancing to some lunatic’s pipe and dodging God knows what creatures to take care of that problem. There are other means.”

  “Think of what you know. Think of what you’ve seen—”

  “What I’ve seen is two corpses and some other things I would rather forget very soon. As to what I know… I don’t know jack, Doc.”

  “You are not five years old. Those ‘things’ aren’t going to cease to exist the moment you put your hands over your eyes.”

  “Let them exist. I can’t do nothing about their existence. They existed long before I knew about them; they will go on existing long after I am dead. What do you want me to become, Doc? A vampire hunter? Sorry, I’m a talk show host, not a super hero, not even an ex-soldier like Lloyd. I get paid to talk and look pretty on TV. I think the best chance I got to stay alive is to simply return to my old life—”

  “How can you even speak of your old life? Do you think you can just become one of them again? Go back to your advertisements, your shows?”

  “I am one of them. And so are you, and she, and Lloyd was, and the blond kid, and even that ten-foot-tall bartender.”

  “Why? Why should we be? Because we have the same number of chromosomes? Is that what makes us the same? Is that why we must accept whatever the rest of them accept? To be part of this circus, this zoo. To be ruled by the glass-eyed majority who are prepared to turn into pillars of salt at someone’s whim, as long as they don’t have to make any decisions?”

  “See, that’s the thing, Doc,” I said quietly. Dr. Young deflated, embarrassed at the volume of his voice. He peered at me accusingly.


  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “The war. The end of the world. I thought about it. It makes no sense. Explain it to me. What could possibly be gained by annihilating the planet? I mean, if you want to rule, there’ll be no one left to rule. If you want the planet, no planet will be left to speak of. Just a piece of radioactive rock. Not to mention making us do it. Why? For what? Amusement?”

  He sighed and slid his hands in the pockets of his brown slacks. His shoulders rose in a slow shrug.

  “You’re right, Mr. Whales. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why they would do it. Nonetheless, I look at the world, I look at people, events, and I believe it to be true. I believe there is a reason for it. But I am allowed to sometimes believe things. After all, I am a priest.”

  He looked up at me with a sudden sad smile. “You know, ever since Mr. Freud introduced us, I was hoping you would be the one to help me put it together.”

  “Me? But how?”

  “By connecting me to Mr. Freud’s employer, all else failing.”

  “You’re telling me you never met him?”

  “Of course not. You were my chance.”

  “Look for him, Doc. I’m sure you’ll find him eventually. Don’t see why you’d want to, though.”

  “Then you have made up your mind.”

  “Sorry, it’s not for me. And thanks for… you know.”

  I fidgeted in place, feeling Iris’s eyes on me and not knowing what to do next. Dr. Young helped me out by hastening to depart.

  “Good-bye, then, Mr. Whales.” He smiled at Iris and took her hand. “Cherish you friends. I really hope you made the right decision. By the way, it wasn’t your friend Paul who made that call to the police. Mr. Freud told me that some time ago, but I never got the chance to let you know.”

  “It was Lloyd,” I stated. Bowing his head full of shiny gray hair, Dr. Young walked out of the room. Iris and I were left alone under the buzzing vent. “Good old Lloyd.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  They put everything on Lloyd. They said rather than a murderer, Luke Whales had been a hostage all this time, and they wondered if a formal apology would be issued. They thought it only fair and the least the authorities could do. All of this was true, but I had no idea how they figured all of that out without me. They made no mention of Iris, a person of interest only half a day ago.

  Iris walked me back to Goethe’s bench and stopped. The plans I had been secretly making during our conversation on the way crumbled around me. I realized it was as far as she would go.

  For several moments we stood in silence, passing a cigarette back and forth and watching the spires of the downtown smoke with us. The promised sun was right there above us, burning like it was about to kick the world backwards into summer. I took my ski hat off and wiped my forehead with it.

  She pulled out a piece of paper and an old ballpoint pen, jotted down a number with “Iris” above it and handed the paper to me.

  “Here,” she said. “This is my number.”

  Normally, a casual gesture like that would mean it was up to me to call, but in this particular case I suddenly wasn’t so sure. It occurred to me that “this is my number” was a silly thing to say, and Iris didn’t say silly things. If she wanted me to call her, I thought to myself, she would have said, “Here. Call me,” and gave me the number. Or, if she wanted to see me again she could have asked for my number in exchange, but she didn’t. She just said, “This is my number,” which is a pretty dumb thing to say when you’re handing someone a sheet of paper with digits and your name on it. Redundancy just wasn’t her style. I suppressed a sigh.

  And stared down at the scrap of paper, doing my darnest to examine it.

  It was strange saying good-bye forever to a girl I didn’t have sex with. It was like the last grain of oddity sand to fall down through a week-long hourglass of weirdness. As soon as it landed, I would be able to flip the bastard and return to my normal life. But I couldn’t bear utter something like, “I’ll keep in touch.”

  Instead, I shook the scrap of paper in my hand, knocked it a few times against the nail of my left thumb and asked, “At the apartment?”

  Iris gazed at me momentarily through narrowed eyes… and burst out laughing. I began to laugh too.

  “You started it!”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Still grinning, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed my cheek, tugging at the arm of my jacket. “Take care, Luke.”

  “Iris!” I called after her. She turned around. A skinny girl in high-heeled boots. “Who the hell are you?”

  To answer that, she bared her teeth and lifted her arms, making mock paws with her tiny hands. She walked backwards like that for a little bit, then turned around and disappeared around a corner.

  Shaking my head, I hooked on my shades and headed briskly across the field of grass towards the lake.

  Backwards. I kept seeing this image of Iris walking backwards, as I walked backwards along the lake. Sand within the imaginary hourglass, which I imagined to have flipped, fell backwards. Everything was backwards. Maybe the sun had, in fact, kicked the world backwards into summer.

  I was experiencing a backward deja-vu. I was seeing it all again: the joggers on the winding lakeshore walkway, the mustached guy on the bike, the dirty birds, the waves, the decorated, jumping boats. As I passed, backwards, the spot where I’d flung my cell phone away, I was sure it was still buried in the silt in the exact same place where it had landed. As well as it should have been, I realize now. Cell phones are not in the habit of strafing around the bottom of the sea, but back then it seemed part of the whole.

  I felt woozy and helplessly disoriented. I suddenly wondered if all that had really happened was just that walk up and down the lake shore on a sunny day. The supposed events of three previous days were so surreal that I could easily recall them all within seconds. Maybe even one second. Maybe less. What if I simply “called” then the events I could so easily re-call now? What if I had walked up to where Goethe was having a picnic, sat on the bench and called them, living through the whole imaginary deal in the matter of milliseconds. What if it’s still the same day?

  But wait a minute, I thought. What about the dead marshal I found in my kitchen before going for a walk?

  And then it dawned on me… I must have called that one too. But then… the shore walk I’ve just considered the real one, must also be a deja-vu of some earlier walk along the beach, which would have been in the same direction I was headed now, and not backwards. While I searched my memory for that fateful, real, previous walk, another idea scared me, namely the idea that there was no guarantee that the previous walk had been, in fact, the real deal and not just another deja-vu. How many deja-vu of the same event could there be? Or maybe! They were not deja-vu at all; they had all been real, these walks, and all I’d done my whole life was walking up and down this beach and calling everything else into imaginary existence. Sisyphus of the Midwest.

  At this point a wry voice spoke inside my excited brain. “Listen, Sisyphus, old man. I know a place you should call next.”

  The gate of the marina barred my way. Above me, the tower, destroyed once in my nuclear fantasy, swayed in the wind. Inhaling deeply to chase away the last remnants of that fearful thought-loop I’d gotten myself into, I pondered going through the main entrance and decided against it. The rewind was complete.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was a guard at my door. Not a cop, but the semi-bearded maintenance guy, whose name I’d forgotten. In an indifferent, business-like manner he explained that he was waiting for the “go” concerning the removal of yellow police tape. He hadn’t specified how long he’d been waiting for, but a day and a half seemed like a decent guess.

  Unable to come up with a topic for conversation, I removed the tape myself. The maintenance guard watched me do it, radioed the office when I was done to relay the development and ask for instructions. He was still waiting when I dropped the twin plastic tape holsters to the floor and
shut the door behind me.

  I was back in my hallway. Back in normal life. After coming home to an empty apartment every day for the last four months, all I required to confirm my solitude beyond doubt was a single glance through the hallway into the living room. The TV screen was black. Sunlight, reflected weakly from airborne particles of heavy metals rising from the streets, coaxed hazy shadows out of the sofa and the overpriced Chinese vase on top of the overpriced magazine table. Faces, mine all of them, peered from de-glossed photographs protecting the cemetery of books I’d never read. The stillness was complete. Only it didn’t feel normal.

  The air was thick and cool, like shaving foam. A familiar feeling of disorientation came over me, only this time it wasn’t a deja-vu. It occurred to me that I was not home at all. It seemed I was looking at a set, expertly prepared for the dramatization of the events that had taken place at the luxury downtown condo of a famous actor and show host Luke Whales. Filming for “America’s Most Wanted.” The fake Lloyd must have just shot his fake partner and now crouched behind the table in the fake kitchen, waiting for… Or maybe this was still the old, more marketable version, in which it’s Luke Whales who kills the marshal and takes the fake Lloyd hostage. Then I would be some guy they hired to play Whales.

  I realized I hadn’t moved from the door. I wondered what the hell was wrong with me and whether or not it was going to go away.

  The door monitor flashed on, Jeffrey’s wide-eyed triangle of a face on it. Or was he and extra? Good casting, even for minor roles. He looked pretty damn close to the real deal. I rubbed my eyes. I was tired.

  “Mr. Whales!”

  “I’m back, Jeffrey.”

  “We heard the news, sir. Congratulations! Isn’t it great how things have turned out?”