Steal the Lightning

by Tim Lees

  She raised her brows.

  “OK,” I said. “Sometimes I lack subtlety.”

  “One way of putting it, I guess. Hey,” she said, pointing to the window with a plastic fork. “Is that that car again?”

  It was the same limo, and it rolled past, just casually taking in the scenery . . .

  I poured another coffee.

  My head still ached.

  Chapter 25

  The Archivist

  Silverman had a big white van, parked off the road. I hammered on the back of it. I called his name. It took a while but eventually the door cracked open. I got a whiff of stale air, and something vaguely human squinted at me through the opening.

  “You dressed?” I said. “There’s ladies present.”

  “Uh, dressed, yeah. What time is it?”

  The little tongue of hair he wore over his forehead stuck up like a Mohawk. Half his face was red and pleated from whatever he’d been using as a pillow, and he was dressed, I guessed, for one good reason: because he hadn’t undressed the night before. The van was stuffed with gear. There were shelves to either side, piled high with cameras, lights and other equipment. A big monitor screen was held in place with thick black straps, and cushioned against jolting. On the floor, between all this, lay a rumpled sleeping bag and a thin foam mattress.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll get you breakfast.”

  It was a strange thing: as we headed for the car, I saw that same limo glide by, serene as a shark’s fin in a tropical lagoon.

  Angel said, “Cleary’s guys?”

  “Who else?”

  In every town, you’ll find a Starbucks, and every Starbucks doubles as an office. Students sit, picking at their laptops, older types make deals and draw up plans, or grumble over last night’s game.

  We got the corner table. Silverman took out his laptop.

  “I want you to see this,” he said. “I thought about it after I got back last night. Took about an hour to find. Maybe you could, you know, see it as kind of my repayment to you. Yes?”

  “Better be good,” I said.

  “Chris,” said Angel. “Give him a chance.”

  Silverman was warming up. It took a while; it took a fair amount of coffee, too. The notion came to me that once he got in gear, once he reached velocity, he wasn’t going to stop.

  “I’m an archivist. Digital, I mean, like, digital is just the best thing ever happened to me. If I had to store this all on VHS, I’d need a warehouse for it. And instead, it’s all on here.” He beamed, tapping at the keys with real affection. “Problem now is trying to keep it catalogued. I’ve got these different projects that I work on, you know, as the opportunity comes up, and sometimes they cross over and something that I took for one winds up in another, and, oh, it’s mostly interviews, some scenery, stuff like that. My girlfriend, well, my ex, I suppose she is now, she says I’m a hoarder, but I don’t hoard papers or toys or old food packaging, like the guys on TV, I hoard these little bits of movies. And, look, if I can find this thing, I’ll show you—”

  He was working through his files, opening folders, checking lists. If there really was a method it was one he didn’t seem to know.

  “I made Rikers this way,” he said, in defense. “It was on PBS and—”

  “Herzog. You said.”

  “Right! But—see—when I got the Registry exhibition I did some cross-referencing. I’m up with the exhibits, don’t think I’m not, but there’s been some negligence over my own work, and . . . well, after Rikers I was kind of stuck. I needed a follow-up. I needed something big, that people could relate to . . . And I thought, every day, I see these homeless people on the street, and I started talking to a few of ’em, and asked if I could film . . .”

  “This is another unfinished project,” I said.

  “No, no. It’s in progress. Definitely in progress. But, see—I met this guy. He wasn’t really homeless but he was kind of hanging out in that scene, same as I was. And we got talking. I just thought he was crazy at first. But he was interesting. This was a while ago, you understand? But after . . . what we saw that night—what you said about her swallowing a god—I thought you ought to see it. Here. Watch this.”

  He turned the screen so we could see. The light was dim, the camera pointing up through several layers of tobacco smoke at what appeared to be a forty-year-old stoner, his hair matted, cigarette hanging from his lips.

  Silverman’s voice, off-screen: “. . . and you were diagnosed . . . you had HIV, yes?”

  “I had AIDS. I had full-blown AIDS.” He sucked the cigarette, pulled the smoke down deep and held it, a pot-smoker’s habit. “I had lesions. And pneumonia. Yeah.”

  “But you’re telling me it’s gone now.”

  “Uh-huh.” Smoke trailing from his lips.

  “That’s good. Good news.” Pause. Then, “And you’re saying you were cured by—by God?”

  “Is that thing on?” His eyes flicked down, and he was looking straight out of the screen at us.

  “No, it’s not on.”

  (Across the table, Silverman glanced at me, and grimaced.)

  On-screen, he said, “Just tell me, though. I want to get this clear. You were cured by God?”

  “A god. By the god that lights our cities. Warms our houses. Your house,” he said, and shivered with laughter. “I had a piece of it. A piece—the size of my thumb. Div, they call it. Div, divine, divinity. I put it on the lesions. Here—and here—and here—” With his cigarette, he traced a path across his chest, up to his shoulder.

  “This was . . . when?”

  “Two years back. See?”

  He rubbed his hand across his shirt.

  “AIDS is shitty, man. It’s shitty . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Guy who turned me on to it—to div—he said to me: we got a mission. All of us. All of us who know, right? Big government. Big industry. Big pharma. They got this power, and they hold it for themselves, and what we need to do, what we need . . .” He cupped his cigarette in both hands. “What we need to do is let it go, yeah? Just . . . let it out.” He opened his hands, cigarette smoke fluttering up. A giggle shook him. “Let it go, uh huh? Fly free.”

  “Yes,” said Silverman’s voice.

  “In the beginning, see—in the beginning, everything belonged to everyone. You know that. People know that. The whole world was alive. And we were part of it. Everything alive.” He spread his fingers. “Connected up. But then . . .”

  He pulled on his cigarette. “Then we got . . . isolated. Cut off from the scheme. Became . . . individuals. Single units. When that happened, we died.” Without moving his head, he looked down. “You’re recording, aren’t you? You fucking liar! You’re recording this—”

  Back in the present, Silverman tapped a key, and the image froze, blurred, the man’s face caught mid-scowl.

  “This sound familiar?” he said.

  “A bit.”

  “There was more, earlier. I couldn’t get the camera on him. I’m guessing this is your distributor, though. You think?”

  He raised his brows; a puppy dog, all keen to please.

  But I’d spent four days talking with Melody Duchess Vanderlisle de Vere, and if I knew one thing, it was this: that she would never, never buy from somebody like that. No matter how lonely, how desperate. Never.

  I said, “Any more?”

  “Couple of minutes. Nothing important.”

  “It might be. Let’s see.”

  Silverman waved a hand, dismissively. But then his eyes narrowed.

  “You want the Herzog moment, don’t you?”

  “What’s that?”

  He pulled at the lobe of his ear, an oddly child-like gesture.

  “Well . . . Herzog. He does an interview, he always leaves a few more seconds, just before he cuts. So you get the silence afterwards. The reactions. Everyone just being, kind of uncomfortable with it . . .”

  “And that’s the rest of this? Uncomfortable silence?” />
  “Um. No. Not really.”

  “What then?”

  “He punched me out, you really want to know. It was . . . kind of embarrassing.” He sucked his lower lip, eyes on the screen. “Luckily he wasn’t very good.”

  Chapter 26

  A History Lesson

  “See?” she said. “It’s trees and open ground. We can bring the car right up, almost to the pond.”

  I couldn’t deny this. The park had beautiful stone gates, but it didn’t have a wall around it. A few bumps, and we could drive straight in, through the trees, almost to the water’s edge. And be practically invisible. At nighttime, anyway.

  Sunlight glittered on the water. Across the lake, the pink and blue of Cleary’s tent had a cheery carnival air.

  I kicked at the mulch and fallen twigs.

  I sniffed the air.

  I said, “They’ll hear the generator.”

  “I was thinking about that. First, we can muffle it. Second . . . can we do it all on battery?”

  She’d worked it out. Between last night and this morning, she’d come up with a plan.

  “Hell, I don’t know.” It was weird, looking around: the sunlight, the trees, the smell of earth and grass . . . and talking like this. Knowing what was in the water there, no matter how calm it might look. I said, “You rouse the thing, you want the power to put it down. If the battery cuts out, and you’re left standing . . .”

  “You said we’d have to be quick. We need to generate the power. We don’t need to sustain it. Right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Right, Chris?”

  “It’s a risk,” I said. Then, “The real question—is it worth it? We phone in, say there’s trouble with the locals. Which there is. They send us somewhere else.”

  “It’s worth it to me, Chris. Is it possible?” she asked me. “Can it be done?”

  Then I saw Silverman. “You filming this?”

  “Um . . . sure.”

  He didn’t put the camera down.

  “Christ’s sake,” I said.

  So we went back to the coffee shop.

  He was trying to do an interview. I’d spent the last ten minutes trying not to answer him, and still he wasn’t giving up. The little red light on the camera glared at me. I sipped my coffee and I glowered back. Then Angel put her hand upon my arm.

  “Chris,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Be nice.”

  So I sat there, and I looked at him, and told myself whatever I might say would probably be lost for decades in the Silverman archives, if we were lucky.

  He said, “This is unusual. This case.”

  I grunted. “Hnh.”

  Angel dug me in the ribs.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t normally go after it?”

  “Maybe not . . . in these circumstances.” But then I thought, well, what the hell? Let’s tell the truth, and get it over with.

  “Actually,” I said, “most times, this is just the point we get called in. Maybe a bit before. There’s a prodromic phase, and then there’s this. Manifestation. This is where the game gets dirty.” I gave him a look. “You want to stop, then here’s the time.”

  He gave a quick shake of the head.

  I said, “If you use anything they don’t like—the bigwigs at the Registry—you know they’ll slap you with a lawsuit so fast you won’t even get your Herzog moment?”

  “Just for the archives.” He smiled, beckoning me on.

  “You did the exhibition. You know how it works.”

  “I know what was in the exhibition. I don’t know the rest.”

  I sighed. I said, for the camera, “OK. Most of the time, you get gods, they’ve been in one place for, oh, a thousand years. Maybe more. Genius loci, right? Spirits of place. Some of them we just mop up while they’re quiescent, nice and easy. Other times, they’re waking up. A bit of poltergeist activity, bit of weirdness . . . when they start being a nuisance, that’s when we get called.

  “Bear in mind, these places have a history. Sometimes they’re sacred spots. Often it’s the priest who calls us in. Which makes it easier.”

  “But not here.”

  “No. Not here.”

  We waited for a moment.

  “You can see the way it starts, back in the mists of history. Place gets a reputation. Soon it’s a shrine or sacred grove, somewhere people go to get a bit of something strange—contact the beyond, all that. Cheaper than drugs. Then someone builds a temple. Next thing, there’s a bunch of monks comes by, everyone’s converted, and, lo and behold, it’s a church. Doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing underneath. In the earth, in the rock, in the soil. They go to ground, the gods. Don’t stir for centuries. They feed on psychic power, as near as we can see. Emotion. Feeling. So any church that generates a bit of fervor . . .”

  “This one must be in its element, then.”

  “Yeah, but it’s probably not local. At a guess, I’d say . . .”

  But I grew wary of the camera once more, and of what I was about to say.

  Angel, sat back, sipped her coffee, and said, “Well, either tell him or don’t.”

  I hesitated.

  I remembered Silverman in Melody’s apartment, freaked out and thrown into a crazy situation. But he’d handled it. He’d handled it.

  I told him, “Turn the camera off.”

  “But—”

  “Turn it off, or we change the subject. OK?”

  He turned the camera off.

  “Some history. Prehistory, more like.” I eyed the camera again. The light was off, but he set it on the tabletop, to reassure me. “What we call gods are agglomerations of energy. We’re not sure where they came from, but it seems they have, or had, some sort of relationship with us, which may have a connection with our own evolutionary development. Maybe we were symbiotes, once upon a time. Or parasites. Whatever the link, it’s an old one, and they get stronger when we take an interest in them. They like attention. Most people don’t realize they’re there, but we have instruments—”

  “Readers,” he said.

  “Yeah. So, we go round, we drain the gods. You did your exhibition. Twenty, thirty years, we’ve supplemented the domestic grid with that. Electric power, right from the gods. This wasn’t widely publicized. Always a bit of trouble with that word ‘gods,’ you know? Especially over here.”

  “But,” he said.

  “It seems we have a situation now where somebody—we don’t know who—is passing around pieces of a god. Or gods. You saw the end result, back in New York. I think this is probably another one, right here.”

  “The miracle cure? Div, divinity?”

  “I’d say that’s more of same. And so is this, that we’ve got here.”

  Silverman watched me for a long time. Then he asked the one question that I’d rather he hadn’t.

  “These pieces of god. They’re Registry, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know yet. They’re doing an analysis on what we got from Melody. I don’t know the results.”

  “But you can guess.”

  He’d taken a while to get up to speed, but he was there now. I thought I’d probably preferred him ignorant.

  “So. The power from the Registry. It’s not contained, like we were told it is.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s not safe, either.”

  “Nothing’s safe. You know how many people died in coal mines?”

  “I’m just trying to get a clearer picture here,” he said.

  One hand twitched towards his camera, but I shook my head.

  “All right,” I said. “You probably know this, but for a long time, if we used a god for power, then that was it: no more god. Another limited resource. At the Indiana facility, and later, in Chicago, they tried a different tack, just bleeding off the power intermittently. Small, steady supply. It was . . . problematic. But it meant that, for a time, we had a stock of god-matter. Divinity in
physical form.”

  “Div.”

  “If you like. And I think that’s where our friend in the pond probably started out. Some piece of something grown in a containment field. That’s my guess. Which means, Pastor Clear-eye’s very own pet god is Registry property, legally owned and waiting to be taken back. Of course, we could go through the courts, but the Registry’s impatient, sometimes.”

  “If it’s yours.”

  “We’ll know that when we’ve got it.”

  “By which time, it’ll be yours anyway . . . ?”

  “The Registry giveth, and the Registry taketh away.” I watched him taking all this in. “Doesn’t sound so Indiana Jones now, does it?”

  Chapter 27

  The Look of a Tall Man

  It bothered me she’d come up with a plan. Bothered me more that it had a chance of success.

  It was the kind of plan I’d probably have dreamed up, too.

  So maybe we could do it on the battery. We’d have no margin for error, no safety net, but if things went well, the whole job would be done in minutes.

  A water retrieval, though? Was it worth the risk?

  And would I feel like this if I’d been training someone else? Someone I didn’t know, didn’t care about? And wasn’t sleeping with?

  I wondered who to call up for advice. Fredericks, my old mentor, would have lots to say, I knew, a stack of stories and opinions. Then, at the end of the day, he’d hum and hah, and tell me, yes, it might work, if I chose to take the risk . . . And I’d be in the dark, just like before.

  When you’re a kid, it feels like everything is either/or. You do your sums, you pass or fail. You’re good or bad. Then you grow up, and life’s not like that. Everything’s a chance. Everything’s a risk. The ground’s not solid any more, even if you wish it were.

  So did that make me an adult, now? If so, it wasn’t something I enjoyed.

  I had a vague idea, in the back of my mind, that I’d let Angel set the whole thing up, then, at the last minute, just before it all got dangerous, I’d step in and take over. Have her step back, out the way.

  She’d give me hell for that, I knew. But like Silverman said: ask forgiveness, not permission.