Maybe I’m a ghost, I thought. So I kicked a pebble. It skittered away. When a fox showed its face I stamped my foot and it ran away.
So far so good.
A drape twitched in a window as I walked under a streetlight and then it dropped back.
The whole thing had been a set up, a smoke and mirrors job, a phantasm. I was real all right, and they weren’t; not in this time.
But I needed somewhere new, a place with nothing but night and an infinite sky, with a brushwood perimeter of hemlock to block out the merging dimensions.
No money in the account the machine said. Easily fixed, I thought. I touched the screen and a flare of green changed all that. All cash with no questions asked and the visible man was invisible once more.
I was the twist in their fate, the bend in their time.
Our parents had put my brothers and I through first to see what happened rather than risk their own lives.
So I’m stuck, forever a stranger, wondering how long it will take this place, this time, to realize that I will never register as someone alive long enough to ever be dead.
(First published in Indigo Magazine, April 2011 )
GUILTY AS DISCHARGED
It was early morning, March 15th, 1964, in a place called the Station Bar, a place that sold nothing stronger than ground coffee.
The interior was dark, its décor browned from years of cigarette smoke and the lighting thankfully weak.
The mezzanine was suspended in shadow and heavily guarded behind wrought iron railings, and behind those railings stood pinball machines hidden in corners of twilight.
Their lights twinkled and pulsed, but there were no sounds.
A locked gate barred this stairway to the light and dark as the door to the street opened and closed and a stranger stepped in from the cold.
From a far corner an insipid ghost oozed from grey to white and shuffled towards the stranger.
The ghost waddled in a gelid swaying motion as if ungluing itself from its own shadow.
The ghost was a man, the owner, a graceless fat swan dying on his feet.
In his grubby apron he asked the stranger if he would like coffee, for that was the only thing anyone ever seemed to ask for at this time of the morning.
The owner's bald head bent in supplication.
His podgy hands worried together, crushing into one another in restrained glee, or perhaps relief, that a customer had actually turned up and sat down.
His smile pushed through a doughy face, a sign of working in the dark too long.
The stranger sat down at the table, his eyes still hidden beneath the wide brim of his hat.
Above them translucent light globes, always on night or day, were furred in dust and filth and hung high on chains with their brown fabric cables twisted around them.
The stranger nodded, yes, he would have coffee.
The owner shuffled away on thin heels over red, near black with grime, linoleum worn in patches here and there, like islands showing through a bed of dried blood.
Chill filled the air and yet the doors were closed to the street.
The windows had been painted shut years ago, the glass they were made of splattered with months of grime.
Closed they might have been but that chill still remained to trace thin fingers through the odor of dead pig meat and brown speckled lard just festering to be reheated for another day's work, whereupon it would be re-fried and blistered to perfection and set upon an unsuspecting public.
A black Rover rolled by outside, then a Morris Minor.
And the stranger watched them through the walls as easily as if they were made of broken glass and shrouds of ancient muslin.
Two in a row, he thought, very unusual.
He took off his hat and placed it on the tabletop.
He pushed it around the salt and pepper pots, then the sugar bowl as he set it skating over the red Formica.
Bored with that he rested his hands on the table itself.
Feeling its coolness he traced his fingers around the chipped edge searching for a catalyst in a drop of moisture, of coffee, of tea, or the residue of dried sweat from fingertips or blood if he was lucky.
Then he found what he was looking for as his fingers rested on a particular spot for he heard the fluttering of a bat's wing in Burma.
He saw dead men, dead soldiers and boys trapped and killed in a far off land, illiterate lads who knew nothing of the wardrobe or the witch, and too busy surviving on the streets for such niceties for a lion in Narnia. For these boys had been cannon pulped in the patriotic fervor for war they never understood.
Invisible lands woven from the Sunday pulpit, a darkened dream into young patriotic minds with the promise to make heroes, a lie that had been forced upon them to grow up too fast and to die too soon in swamps of blood and political prestige.
The stranger leaned back and reached into his pocket for his pack of Players Plain. He flipped open the top and looked in at the twin rows of ten on ten, at the shredded leaves neatly cut through.
He nipped one by the edge, dragged it out and put it in his mouth. He sucked air through the white tube of paper and saltpeter then struck a match, pulling the flame into end to the sound of reveille.
He felt every one of them in pain, every one of them who had died.
But the worst pain was from the one who had been betrayed.
That was why the stranger was here.
And now he sat waiting as the fat man shuffled back and laid his coffee on the table.
The cup clinked in its saucer, the sound as grating as fingernails ripped off in the dark, or scraping down on a concrete pillar, but not worse than a bullet in the eye, or a seventeen-year-old boy's bravery torn from his guts by a serrated bayonet in a sticky humid land of leaves and tangled vines.
"They gave their lives so we may live," the stranger spoke around the cigarette between his lips.
"Sorry?" the fat man asked perplexed.
The stranger looked up.
His blue-grey glittering eyes stared up at the fat man, blinked then looked away again.
"Strangers in an even stranger land," the stranger said.
He looked up again and saw the quizzical look his words had caused on the fat man's face.
"Just thinking out loud," he said blowing out streamers of smoke wondering what the hell those boys saw in these things.
"Better than crying out loud," the fat man said without knowing why he had said such a thing.
A painful smile of uncertainty cut through his face, like cheese wire slicing through unbaked dough, as he rubbed his hands on his grubby apron.
"Anything else," he asked raising his eyebrows, "something to eat, perhaps?"
"Geometric progression," the stranger said.
"Excuse me?"
"It moves faster than you think," the strangers said.
He sipped his coffee.
"Ah, well, nothing else then," the fat man said.
"Yes," the stranger said slowly.
"Yes?"
"Please," the stranger said, "Sit down."
The stranger reached out snaking his fingers around the back of the chair to his right and pulled it out from the table. Its wooden legs scraped through the ingrained grime of the flooring.
The fat man watched and held his hands apart mid way between preach and prayer then found them suddenly sucked together in a clap.
It made him cringe inside, the sound, in silence like live flesh slapping on rigor meat.
It wasn't much of a sound, and no sound at all in a battlefield.
But inside the cafe, in the dim and the dark of its interior behind the shrouded swaddling of bricks and grimy glass, it sounded like an explosion.
Jericho's trumpets the stranger thought and smiled.
"I have to get back to work," fat man said. "Customers, you know, hungry, living to make. You know how it is."
The fat man looked around at the shadows and empty tables at the windows, through the grey ne
tting blotting out the day. He was searching for salvation at the closed doors as the sweat oozed from the meat of his brow.
"In time," the stranger said.
And his hand rested for a second longer on the back of the chair he had pulled out before he let it go.
It was a forced invitation.
The doors of the cafe shuddered.
Mere vibrations as things settled into proper focus.
For beyond them the world had receded and rushed back behind them in a gun metal shadow eclipsing the sun's rays for long enough and no more, just enough of a flicker for reality to unhinge
The fat man looked down at the chair as the stranger clicked his fingers, carapaces of dung beetle black, on the tabletop.
"Sit, please," the stranger insisted.
Gravity began to exceed the fat man's mass, dragging his internal organs lower, tugging them down inside.
He felt deflated, the optimum pressure keeping him alive escaping from his withering veins.
Suddenly the chair seems an enticing option and he slumped down on it.
"Have you ever considered calculus?" the stranger asked flicking cigarette ash into the sugar bowl.
The fat man watched as the ash glided down too slowly, trapped in a local dilatation of time.
And he continued to watch as it was swallowed by the sugar with the sound of a rock sucked into a pool of congealing blood.
The fat man shook his head as his jowls gained weight and the bags under his eyes grew heavy.
"Cut a sheet of paper half way down," the stranger said. "Then cut what's left to half way down again, then again, and again and again. How many cuts does it take to cut the sheet of paper in half?"
The stranger settled back.
The joints of his straight backed chair creaked, and he took a long deep drag of his cigarette as he watched the fat man's eyes water. Not through crying, but because he could not close them.
The fat man shook his head as if in a dream.
A thick drop of yellow serum trickled from his eye and rolled down his sagging cheek.
"Not even a guess?" the stranger asked unconcerned.
The fat man shook his head again as his jowls pulled themselves beyond his jaw line and his neck expanded to accommodate the gathering mass.
"The answer is never," the stranger said. "Imagine that! You never reach the end because you are only ever cutting half way of whatever is left. Imagine that, hmm?"
Fat man's brow sunk, pulling his hairline lower until it was an inch above where his watering eyes glimmered in pools of sludge.
"Which means," the stranger smiled at him, "that what is happening to you now, won't ever stop. Like your guilt, it will pull you downwards forever. And I am here to tell you that it will keep on going, even when you are dead."
The stranger's thin lips pulled tight.
"But you can get very close to it," he said. "Exponentially ten times ten times ad vomitum until the doctors grow bored with your obvious pain, which you brought on by yourself anyway, as we shall soon see. And they will then walk away from you, and they leave you alone in a concrete bunker, because they don't know how to help you. They will leave you in your own personal misery of indescribable and eternal agony, throw up their hands, and forget you. And that's because you will be an embarrassment for their failure to do anything for you. But not me!" the stranger thrust his face an inch away from the fat man's. "And that is why you are now trapped in fractal oblivion. All because of the endless misery and suffering that you caused. And thought you could get away with it."
The stranger slumped back in his seat.
"But the act did not die back there and then," he said. "It only suffered the cuts endlessly and forever until it cut right back here to you. It is still here. And I followed to you here, all because you, my man, are the focal point of an endlessly long pain. Get it?"
The stranger watched as the fat man sank further inside his own bulk.
"Guilt always finds a way, you know. You ate and ate hoping to hide your guilt from everyone. But it doesn't work on me," he said.
He looked around.
"You picked the wrong place to start a business," he went on. "This is the place they used to bring the dead back to for collection from Burma isn't it? Some bodies weren't collected at all, of course, and that's because they had no families before they were packed off to fight a war they were tricked into. No call collect for them then. Like your friend. He was a friend, wasn't he?"
The fat man began to sway, or was it the walls?
Everything rushed away from him into a grayness that engulfed his entire surroundings.
Stars appeared and glittered. There was an acceleration of movement inside his head as the grayness solidified to the sound of rapid gunfire and screams of pain.
Another yell of agony was cut off in a volley of gunshot.
Heat swamped in thick and green like blankets of algae and wafting seaweed that found itself being parboiled close to a river of lava.
The fat man looked down at his feet, at the corpse lying there, at the headless body, at the bloody pulp that had once been a boy his own age.
The fat man's name was Jim, and felt the hot metal of his rifle in his hands, and saw how thin his arms used to be when they were once swathed in khaki.
#
"They're gaining on us," Frank said.
Jim looked at him, at his friend, both of them thrown into the chaos of a war a million miles from home.
Both of them thin starved waifs.
Jim wanted to break cover and run as fast as he could. But the enemy was so sneaky, so quick, that he wouldn't stand a chance.
He crouched behind Frank.
"We're never going to make it," he whimpered almost crying in the heat, the terror.
Frank looked over his shoulder at him.
In a few weeks" of war his handsome face has been hollowed to that of an old man.
"Don't say that," Frank said with a sound of reassurance, and then smiled. "We'll get out of here, you and me, together. I promised I would see you safe."
Jim shook his head, a wild terror in his eyes.
"We're never going home, never," he said as the green bile of terror rushed up from his gut. He swallowed hard on it but it spewed up through his nose instead.
"Come on, pal. It's me. Frank. We'll make it, don't you worry."
And it was just like Frank to be reasonable.
It had always soothed Jim in the past.
But now, out here, in green hell, it angered him. Something had to be done.
Frank turned around from his crouching position and laid a hand on Jim's shoulder.
"Come on, pal. Take it easy. Haven't I always been true to my word? When we get out of this you can buy me a beer. It'll be legal for me to have one when we get back home."
He gave Jim a last smile and turned away.
"I'll keep watch out this way," he said "and you watch out for our backs."
Seeing his chance Jim reached down to the knife in his boot.
Gripping its handle he slipped it out, raised the blade high and slashed it hard into Frank's back.
"Jim!" the word escaped Frank in a husky squeal.
He grimaced, pulling his lips tight.
Frank half spun around and hit the ground on his back as Jim raised the blade high again slashing it into Frank's belly.
Frank reached out instinctively, grabbing Jim's wrist, the knife still in him.
"Jim, pal, what are you doing?"
Jim wrenched the blade upward ripping Frank's grip free and his guts wide.
Jim staggered to his feet, snot and bile pouring in burning streams from his nose as Frank's eyes looked up at him, pleading, trying to understand.
"Jim, boy, why?" his face creased in agony. "You're my pal."
Jim stepped back and watched.
Frank gripped at the wound in his gut and rolled over onto his front as he tried to push himself up, and crawled on his elbows towards Frank.
> "Jim, don't leave me, pal, please. Where are you going? They'll get me."
Jim gritted his teeth, rushed at Frank and kicked him in the head, and sent him sprawling onto his back.
"Why won't you die for fuck's sake?" Jim yelled as tears of rage blinding his eyes. "Just die!"
"Christ almighty, Jim!"
Jim turned and ran.
#
There was a flash and a bang.
The stranger held his hand in front of Jim's face as if he had just snapped his fingers together.
The stranger settled back into the dust and the grime and the gloom of the cafe.
"But enough of that," he said wearily with a sigh.
"No," the fat man said.
"Oh but yes, Jim," the stranger in the wide brim hat said.
"Frank was like my own brother," Jim said as he struggled to his feet and then stumbled back.
"And you killed him," the stranger said his eyes turning to slits.
"I didn't! He was still alive. I only wounded him, I had to!"
"Murderer!"
"No," the fat man shook his head. "They took him. I only wounded him, that's all."
"Your own friend and you murdered him for your own skin."
"I had to do something," the fat man's words bubbled through the lard of his own flesh oozing between his lips.
"A bird with a broken wing, providing the distraction you needed to escape," the stranger said. "Jim was the bait for your trap."
"What else could I do?" the fat man pleaded.
"He's dead!"
"I didn't kill him. I didn't. Oh please God help me. I didn't know what I was doing," he whined. "Can't you see that?"
"He died three days before the camp was liberated, still forgiving you. You slaughtered him. And he had no one. No one! He loved you like the brother he never had. The family he never had. And he prayed for you right up until the end of his life, knowing he would never get out alive, prayed as he lay dying and the maggots ate at his guts, that you, you, at least would live. To live the life you had both dreamed of as boys."
"No, God, please, the pain."
"Scum!"
The stranger's movements were quick, unreal. Suddenly he was on his feet and towering over Jim.
"You don't understand," the fat man pleaded. "I was desperate."
The stranger stepped closer.
Revolution Page 7
