Don't cave in on me now, Sean.
"Fuck it!"
Reaching into my top pocket and yanked out my emergency pack of Marlboro Lights, took one out and tapped the end of it on the side of the box like a real pro.
I'd gone a whole week without smoking, but I'd kept a pack close to my heart, just to prove to myself how in control I was.
And then that thing appeared on my desk.
"Well… So much for the self-imposed prohibition shit."
Preparation is everything, Sean.
So I lit up, inhaled deep and blew the smoke in a stream high over the desk.
"So what now?"
Take a peek.
"Uh uh, don't wanna."
Coward.
"I'm thinking."
You're chicken shit.
I inhaled then nibbled at my thumbnail as I stared down at the envelope. And it was glowing whiter by the second.
Do it!
I lurched from my chair, hands in a dive then let them hover over the envelope for a second without touching it.
I snapped my hands away and curled my fingers tight until my nails were digging into my palms.
I puffed more smoke.
"I've got to think first."
What the hell for?
I shook my head looking at it sitting there.
"It's not mine and I don't want to look at it."
Yes you do.
"Uh uh, no I don't."
You need to, Sean. You know that thing's not gonna to let go of yah unless you take a peek.
"I said I wouldn't."
Why?
"Because I told the buyer I would just hand it over, no looking. I promised."
Who cares, man?
I opened and closed my fingers over the thing again as I sucked cold air through my teeth.
Sean?
"I'm thinking. I'm thinking."
Fuckin open it!
My hand slammed down on the envelope.
I felt around, pressing through the paper, on an outline of something small and square and flat inside.
History or bunk, the sensation of a lifetime or a hoax, it didn't matter. Because someone was still willing to pay a very high price for it, and that did matter.
And it was at that point that I found out just how good it feels to own something that no one else can have.
Biting my lip I slipped my fingers under the flap of the envelope and reached inside.
I didn't know what to expect, a static tingle maybe, at least something special upon touching it.
But I didn't feel a thing as I gripped it under my fingernails and dragged it out into the open.
Face down I left the old black and white Polaroid on the desk for a while longer before I dared turn it over.
And when I did I sat back, took deep drag on my cigarette, and looked down at the face of man from another world.
#
Charlatan, hoaxer or plain self deluded, George Adamski, "professor" to his followers, met a "man from another world" in the Catskill Mountain, Northern California, on November 15th, 1952.
That man was Orthon.
Adamski wrote a best seller, 20,000 in hardback, that stamped him onto the map of the weird and the wonderful forever. His photographs of flying saucers were first printed in Fate Magazine, which brought him to the attention of his would be publishers.
The only other person, apart from Adamski himself, who had ever seen Orthon, was Lou Zinsstag, Adamski's then secretary. And it was Adamski, of Polish and Egyptian descent, who had let Zinsstag glimpse this very photograph.
It was unique. One of a kind.
And no copies of it had ever been made.
And no one knew what had happened to it after Adamski died in 1962 either.
Until now.
#
I sat there looking down at it, careful only to touch the edges in case the sweat from my fingers damaged the emulsion. The picture was already faded, more grey and white than black and white. But the image was clear enough.
A young guy in profile with fair-hair cut short, maybe twenty-four, twenty-five. But the guy looked much like any other guy to me. His eyes were Asiatic, though thinner and longer than normal, his nose slimmer, his jaw-line longer than you might expect. Still, if you met him on the street, there wasn't much about him that said I am from another planet.
No second glance required.
It was a hoax. It had to be.
A few bucks had been passed on to some no Joe schmuck, his picture had been taken in 1952, and that was that. I was convinced of it. Rumor and legend had done the rest.
My buyer was wasting his money.
Still, no one had ever come forward and claimed, that's me. I'm the guy in the picture. Then again, since the picture was never made public, what was there to come forward for?
The whole thing felt like a snake eating itself out of existence.
It didn't matter. The Turin shroud is a fake, I told myself, a fourteenth century fake. But that doesn't make it worthless. It's still priceless.
Well this picture wasn't the Turin shroud, and the guy in it sure wasn't Jesus Christ either. But it was worth something, even if only for the legend behind it.
It's a funny thing about not seeing something you're convinced exists. I grows in your mind, until it becomes an unbearable mystery that blooms out like a wet crystal of gentian violet staining every brain cell in its path.
What if some geek decides to steal it?
"Now why would anyone want to do that? I mean it's just an old photograph, right? There's nothing about it that says Orthon, Man from Venus, now, is there? Who even knows about it?
Andresen for a start.
"Shut up!"
And every freak with a spare meat cleaver sniffing around for blood, just itching to chop his way into the history books.
Now I knew that I couldn't trust letting it out of my sight.
I sat down to think about it some more and swung back and forth in my good old battered desk chair.
What makes anything worth anything? The cost of the paint for the portrait, the canvas it was painted on, the cost of a lump of granite some ugly museum piece was chiseled out of?
Because it's one of a kind, that's why.
Yeah, that's it. Because it's one of a kind. I mean, look at a Picasso. Everyone suddenly wants one and then price shoots up. Nobody likes the damn things, and most of them end up slammed inside a vault where no one can see them anyway, or a gallery where folks duly come along to see what kind of an idiot with too much money has decided to buy, and the fact that the idiot only bought it because it's the only one of a kind of that particular Picasso. It's like a runaway train. It's the principle of feedback.
But Orthon was no Picasso. The eyes maybe, the nose, the thin lipped mouth, the extended jaw line, but he was no Picasso.
What about a stolen Picasso? A missing Picasso? A Picasso that no one knew about, but which was rumored to exist? A Picasso hidden away in some dingy basement, a Picasso that can only be looked at under torchlight, never on public display, because there's always some psycho with a cleaver ready to acquire it for some idiot buyer with too much money.
It's ownership that pushes the price through the roof, and that price is only a measure of want, of need, of compulsion and obsession. How many men or women on the street couldn't give a shit for a Picasso? How many of the few who knew of the hidden Picasso would pay anything to get their hands on it? Who would be willing to keep that secret hidden away for fear of it being slaughtered for it?
#
No copies.
Something jerked inside of my skull like a hornet sting.
Here I was in possession of the most sought after piece of underground mumbo jumbo memorabilia there ever was, and it was the only one of its kind.
I dropped it back in the envelope, safe, sound, secure, out of sight out of mind. And after I did that I swear to God I had to take a second peek, just to make sure it was really in there.
&
nbsp; It was.
Thoughts crashed in and tugged away again before I had time to make any sense of them, images and blurs jiggering with lethal little spikes of orange and violet that somehow I just knew were tattooing the real truth all over my brain.
I needed prints made. Ten say, but no negatives.
This was already turning tricky.
I didn't want to let the thing out of my sight.
I could take it to a developer, have reproductions made from the original. But that would mean having to let go of it.
But what if something happened to it, it got lost, destroyed, and my take on it gone with it?
And already I could see some lethal concoction spilling over the emulsion and the whole image of Orthon sliding away in a rip tide along with my money.
And what if some geek decided to steal it?
A dangerous geek.
But why would anyone do that? It's just an old photograph. There's nothing on it that says Orthon, I am a Man from Another World. So who would know?
Those creeps are everywhere.
I jumped up and pushed my fingers through my hair.
I couldn't trust letting it out of my sight.
I was shaking with every thought.
I had to keep it safe.
Okay, so how many knew I had it? Mrs. Andresen for one and me made two, only two. And she wasn't about to talk.
Or had she?
I stood up and went over to the coffee pot on my filing cabinet, the one with the busted locks. I pulled open the top drawer and yanked out a mug. But my eyes kept swinging over to that envelope on the desk behind me.
Pouring the coffee I turned my back on it for a few seconds.
What about the door?
I had visions of a wild-eyed maniac bursting through the wall, an axe in one hand, and his mission statement written in green ink in his other.
"But no one knows it's here."
"Except for the ads, the small print, the web pages. Jesus Christ, half the fucking planet knows I was looking for it!"
Looking for it, but they don't know I have it.
Secrets and lies.
"Give me a break."
No one wants it except the buyer, and it hasn't cost me zilch so far. I don't even know if it's the right one, or even if it existed in the first place.
So it's a fake.
"What difference does that make?"
#
I had to think.
I could scan it. I could stick it on the computer. I could fire it into hyperspace and firewall the damn thing from here to Mars. I could shield it from key loggers and malware, spyware, snoopers and hackers, from all those creepy little shits.
They'll figure it out, Sean. They'll know you're hiding something.
Yeah, and then it'll be all over the internet and each downloaded copy dissipating the power of the original. Christ, even the Pentagon can't keep hackers out.
You can't do it. You can't upload it. You can't even digitalize it.
"I can't do anything with it."
I spilt coffee over my hand.
"Shit!"
I licked it off and sucked the sting went out of my fingers.
#
Scan it?
"Nah, the heat of a scanner might melt the damn thing and turn it into fudge."
I put the coffee down on the desk and lit another cigarette.
Think.
I have it and nobody else does. That's makes a difference.
And I could lose it.
Or get killed for it.
"Shut up!"
I inhaled the smoke deeper. The ashtray was mountain of cigarette butts spilling all over the desk.
I calmed down. I had to calm down. And after a few deep breaths I felt better. I stubbed my cigarette out and lit another.
"Besides, who's even heard of Adamski?"
Well, since his flying saucer photographs adorn the walls of every nut on the planet, not to mention enthusiast, I'd say about whole the world.
I poured another coffee.
This was turning tricky into impossible.
I could stick it in a vault. It might be safe there. But then what about me?
What if anyone finds out I have the damn thing?
Deny deny deny.
"But that would only make it sound as if I have something to hide, which I have."
Tell them that it's worthless then.
"Same goes."
Go public.
"Get fuckin real. And lose everything I've worked for? What about the book?"
My arms flew wide as I addressed an audience of stale air.
I could just see it now. My book dead, dud and buried even before it had a chance to be born. And if no photograph I had no story.
Don't hand it over then. Don't give it to the buyer.
"It's too dangerous to keep."
I've got it.
"What?"
We'll go out and burn it in the desert together.
"But that would mean I would have to give the buyer his money back, and bang goes my commission with it."
Just keep the money.
"Yeah, right."
And there I was one flight up in the only office space I could afford, inside a disused paper mill on the edge of town. It was Alcatraz stuck on an island of dust and scrub bush that stretched out like a moat for miles around, an island built on iron pilings and shrouded in rusty chains too heavy to swing in a hurricane.
"I should have paid her for it, insisted, a token gesture, a transaction of some kind. "
There was something in that.
But something Mrs. Andresen had blocked, her way of stopping the natural flow of things.
She had been smart. I'll say that for her. She'd cut the cord that binds, then walked away like nothing had ever happened.
That bitch!
Yeah, well, it had nothing to do with money according to her. And by the look of it she didn't need it anyway. But what she had done was to break the way of things, destroyed the road between her and it.
And she's left you with it, Sean, stuck you with it in your hand in the headlights of every raving loony, jamming his foot down hard on the gas, coming at you in an army of khaki-colored ten-ton trucks, jiggling with spent uranium warheads.
"Hey, stay off my side, will yah?"
Saw-ree.
This wasn't the way things were supposed to have happened. This hadn't been in the story when I'd gone over it in my mind, a story that hadn't blurred to hell copy from copy style as I'd sit there reading her letter, night after night, over and over again.
Exchanging the money had been the main thing in it for me, though, minus my cut of course. I would have felt a sense of right to the picture if she had taken the check, a real sense of passage of ownership.
Hand it over, burn it or keep it. Make up your mind for Christ's sake!
"Beat it!" I screamed at the wall.
I let the thumping in my veins subside a bit, and calmed my breathing as I stepped around my desk looking down at that damned envelope innocently lying there.
I pulled a face at it.
It's wrong. It's all wrong I tell you.
And there was something else. If I gave the buyer his money back, along with the picture, he might think that I was giving him a fake, not the real thing, that maybe I was holding onto the real one, and keeping it for a higher price.
Whichever way I looked at it I was stuck with it.
It started to feel like trying to flick sticky fly paper off my fingers that was already snaking around my arm.
Don't look an alien in the mouth.
"Who's looking?"
Okay, so I have it now, the photograph, and all is well. I have the final piece of the jigsaw. I have Orthon in profile, the guy who played a central part in one of the biggest hoaxes of the twentieth century. Now all I needed to do was publish the book about the lead up to finding it, and be damned.
Don't give the guy his money back.
"No!"
Keep it.
"Shit!"
#
The sun angled through the window behind me.
I turned in my chair and looked up at the glass, at the grime and the yellowed paper stuck to it on the outside.
A breeze flicked the bottom right corner that had peeled away reminding me of a time when I was a kid when I had watched the wing of a dragonfly caught in a spider's web.
I'd learned in close to it, blew on the wing, and the sun had shone through it refracting all the colors of an oil angel.
I'd thought the dragonfly was dead, until one of its legs kicked, and a spider rushed out of nowhere and covered it.
I'd jumped back, like now, when that thing thumped against the glass, right there in the corner where the paper flickered in the desert breeze.
I stood up breathing hard. The skin of my back prickled with a million needles of nitrogen stabbing into my spine.
I pressed myself hard against the wall, then slid along it until I could peek out a corner of the window.
But there was nothing out there except for the sun going down behind a flat desert horizon, and shadows from rocks clawing their way across a wasteland towards the building.
Maybe a bird had lost its way. Maybe it had seen its own reflection in the glass and gone on the attack.
And maybe you're just going nuts.
I pushed myself away from the wall and stepped out from behind my desk.
It was too lonely out there and felt about as safe as being stuck on another planet without a return ticket.
I had to get away, to go somewhere safe where I could think.
#
When I got back to the apartment I yanked down the blinds and dropped the envelope on the coffee table before going for the Wild Turkey, my thinking fluid.
On first sip the telephone rang.
My skin prickled cold all over again only this time it gave me an itch that left me feeling like I was dead meat on bones.
The damn phone kept ringing.
It had to be the buyer.
I took a breath, held it for a second then let it out slowly as I reached for the receiver.
It stopped ringing just as I touched it.
Forget it.
I flopped down on the sofa, lit up a cigarette, and watched the sun bleed below the horizon through the slats of the blinds.
Keep the money and give the guy the graph.
Get rid of it, Sean.
I switched on the lamp then reached out, picked up the envelope by the corner as if it was contaminated, and let the picture bounce onto the table.
Revolution Page 3
