Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Yeah,” Tabitha cut him off, voice an octave below its usual pitch. “It’s a copy of him.”

  Devon left hers on the table. I wanted to do the same. But how do you do that to a friend? To what’s left of a friend?

  So now, I’m riding down in an elevator, with Clyde in my pocket, and a bottomless hole in my stomach.

  Subbasement 3

  The elevator doors ping open. The corridor is gloomy, has a musty, abandoned smell. It reminds me of the MI37 facilities back in Oxford. I feel abruptly homesick.

  I’m following up on an idea I had last night. Someone wrapped up in all this that no one seems to have thought to question.

  The guy at the MI6 front desk gave me an office number. But now I’m down here, the labeling of office doors seems to have been carried out by drunken preschoolers. It’s only after fifteen minutes of walking in circles that I find the right one.

  I knock. There is no reply. I try the knob. It turns easily and the door swings open.

  My jaw swings open a little bit too.

  I am at the top of a flight of gray aluminum stairs. They take angular turns, leading fifteen feet down to a small concrete platform jammed full of rickety metal shelving. The shelves are covered in tool boxes, battered textbook-sized instruction manuals, scrolls. A small desk covered in novelty ashtrays has been jammed into one corner. Beyond the platform the floor drops another six feet, and beyond…

  I stare out over a vast subterranean warehouse.

  There are more shelves, bigger ones. Some loaded down with pallets and plastic yellow crates. Bronze statues, ankhs, glittering crystals, chipped marble busts, odd gnarls of machinery, strings of dirty jewelry, dried plant stalks, candlesticks, crucifixes, unidentifiable chunks of wood, tiny glass vials—all overflow from the containers, spilling onto the shelving. There’s a forklift parked down there. There are wider spaces. Glass tanks filled with amorphous shapes floating in ochre fluid. Cages full of stuffed animals with too many heads, too many limbs, too many species mixed into their forms. I can see the two halves of the Trafalgar Square lion Clyde kebobbed the other day leaning up against one wall.

  And a tree. In the middle of it all, a tree reaching towards the cavernous ceiling.

  A tree that’s waving at me.

  “Arthur, mate. You are like a vision of bustiness to a sex-deprived man.”

  “Winston?” Jesus. He’s still a tree.

  “Meant that in a totally heterosexual way,” Winston qualifies. “Not that there’s anything wrong with the other way.” He shakes branches at me trying to fix my attention as he wrestles his own under control. “You have got to get me out of here, man.”

  “Winston,” I repeat, still trying to recover. He isn’t the person I was looking for. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on? What’s going on?” Winston throws up his branches, almost toppling a column of precariously stacked wooden crates. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’m bloody wilting is what’s going on.”

  It takes me a while to realize that this is meant literally. I seem to have trouble keeping up with the recently metamorphosed. But yes, I’ll admit his leaves do look pale and droopy.

  “Daylight bulbs aren’t cutting it man. And the bowl of water this dick has me standing in is hardly bloody sufficient for root growth. I need a park. I need greenery. Wind in my hair. Somewhere I can really settle in.” The bark whorls of his face knot together, a look of pain. “I need some bloody company.”

  I start to descend the stairs, sorting out the signal from the Winston-generated noise, trying to get to the facts. “Who put you in a bowl of water?” I say just before I enter into the warren of bookshelves.

  “I bloody did.”

  I almost fall the last four feet of the stairs. The short man emerges from around the corner of the bookshelf, almost seems to detach himself from it. I feel like a cloud of smoke and a rimshot on the drums wouldn’t be amiss.

  Two beady black eyes regard me from either side of the knife-edge of a nose.

  “Wallace,” he says to me. He looks suspicious.

  I nod, in what I hope is an encouraging way. “You shot me up with drugs after Trafalgar Square. You do cleanup for us.”

  He wrinkles his nose. It might be a sign of recognition. I might not have fully shed myself of the smell of bird shit. It’s hard to tell. He thumbs back at Winston.

  “Thinks I want to bloody keep him. Like I’m fond of his bloody company. Because all I have to do is sit around listening to him bitch and moan. Soundtrack to my life that is.” He rolls his eyes. “Probably thinks this place is so roomy it could really do with a tree in it.” Another roll of the eyes.

  “So you’d like to—” I start.

  “Get rid of him? Love to.” The little man hugs himself in paroxysms of fake delight. “Ship him off to a park? My wildest dream. But he talks, and he talks.” He spins as he says this last, to face Winston’s towering bulk. “And he talks. And he talks.” The volume rises. “AND HE TALKS. AND HE TALKS. AND HE TALKS!” The little man turns back to me breathing hard. He puffs out his cheeks, blows it out. Forces up a smile like a supermodel forces up her last meal.

  “How the flying buggery fuck am I meant to put him in the middle of the park when he won’t shut up? I’d put him in the middle of a forest but there’s hitchhikers. I’d put him,” this last said with another acidic glance over his shoulder, “in the middle of the bloody rain forests if I had jurisdiction in Brazil, but they’re still pissed on account of the bloody monkeys.” He doesn’t elaborate further.

  “You love it,” Winston bellows from the back of the room. “You never had it so good as now I’m here. You can’t bear to be bloody parted from me.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” The little man turns away, purple-cheeked.

  “He touched me, Arthur! It was inappropriate!”

  My mind blanches at that one. How in God’s name—

  “It was with bloody pruning shears!” The little man bellows back at him.

  “He’s into the rough stuff, Arthur! You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  Oh my God. I can’t… I can’t… We put the world back wrong. So very, very wrong.

  “I was really hoping,” I start saying, wondering if I can just pretend that exchange didn’t happen, “that we—”

  “He’s here to see me, not you!” the little man shrieks viciously over his shoulder. Then he turns back to me with an ingratiating smile. “Go on.”

  “OK,” I attempt, “I wanted—”

  “Et tu Arthur?” Winston breaks in. “Abandoned is it? Only ever interested in me for my research skills?”

  “I just wanted,” I persevere, “to ask you about—”

  “Clyde too, I suppose,” Winston goes on. “Digital over the analog, I suppose.” Somehow, and I really have no idea how, Winston manages to sniff.

  “Shut up!” the little man screams over his shoulder. Tendons in his neck quiver. Again he turns back to me, cheeks the color of beets. Again he smiles, simpering. He gestures with his hand. “Go on.”

  “Was wondering—” Everything feels very surreal, very fake. “—if perhaps you could let me know if there had been—” I keep waiting for the interruption but it’s not coming. “—any oddities you’d noticed at the British Museum, or the Natural History Museum. Especially any that seemed to involve some sort of spatial or temporal component.”

  The little man gives me an abrupt but seemingly genuine smile. The first one so far.

  “You’re not having me on are you?” he asks.

  I’m not entirely sure what tack the conversation has just taken.

  “No,” I say tentatively.

  “You’re interested?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “No one’s interested in you and your shit!” Winston bellows.

  “SHUT UP!” The little man then turns back to me and offers up the same anxious smile. “No one ever asks about me,” he says.

 
; “Well, I just wanted to know—” I’m trying to get things back on track.

  “I stopped sending reports back to people five years ago and I’m still waiting for someone to complain.” He sniffs a little bit.

  “That’s a shame,” I say.

  “No it bloody isn’t!” Winston yells across the room at us.

  I’ve sort of given up hope on finding an answer at this point. I’ll be lucky to get out with my sanity intact.

  “I used to put a lot of effort into those reports,” says the little man. “Used to be works of bloody art.” He looks at me, trying to still a quivering jaw. “I used bullet points.”

  “That was er… very thoughtful,” I venture.

  “He’s only interested in himself, Arthur! He’s a hollow, self-centered, little man.”

  The cleanup man turns back, fists shaking. “How would you know? How would you ever realize? It’s you, you, and always you! Always you!” He turns back to me. “I miss writing,” he says.

  “Maybe you should take it back up,” I suggest.

  “But why bother?” he asks.

  “Give up!” Winston chips in, slightly too enthusiastically.

  There are moments in life where things come out of my mouth and I am not entirely sure why. Some poorly programmed autopilot fulfilling an anticipated piece of conversation. The insufficient survival instinct that got me working for MI37 in the first place. But against all reason, I say, “I’ll read them.”

  “What?” Winston bellows.

  “What?” The little man is clutching himself again, but this time the delight is real. “You would?”

  “Erm—” I say, thus committing myself fully to the madness.

  The little man actually claps his hands. He starts skipping.

  “You’ve doomed yourself, Arthur, mate,” says Winston. “You’ll regret this moment for the rest of your life.”

  I have a worrying feeling that Winston is being unusually prescient.

  “I’m going to write one,” the little man says to me. “I’m going to write one right now.” He looks away, then back at me, a look of devilish glee on his face. “I’ve got a good one.”

  He makes towards his desk.

  “Wait,” I say. One last desperate attempt to get the information I came for.

  The little man turns, an eyebrow raised.

  “Odd effects,” I say again. “Spatial or temporal. At the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, Trafalgar Square.” I give him my best you’re-crazy-but-I’m-going-to-treat-you-fairly-decently-anyway smile.

  “But… But…” The little man sputters. “My report. I was going to put it in my report.” He looks crestfallen.

  “No one wants to read your bloody reports,” Winston yells. “I’ve had it up to here with your reports. All I ever hear about is your reports.”

  Purple clambers up from the man’s collar again. He spins on Winston. “He wants to hear them! He’s bloody begging for them. They’re masterpieces in miniature. You’re just jealous because one day you’ll be chopped down and turned into paper for me to write one on!”

  He turns back to me. “I was going to write it down.” He’s almost begging me.

  “Oh,” I say, doing the social arithmetic. “I don’t want the full thing now. Just a… a…” I struggle for the word. “A verbal abstract of the full paper. An overview. An appetizer.” I smile as winningly as I am able.

  “An appetizer?” The little man contemplates this. There is at least a fifty percent chance that I’ve just pushed him into a murderous rage.

  “To pique my pallet.” Which is probably taking it all a little too far.

  The little man nods. “Oh.” He rubs his hands. “Yes. Yes. I understand.”

  Thank God one of us does.

  “Well,” he stands conspiratorially close to me, “as I would have put in my report,” he smiles, corrects himself, “as I am going to put in my report,” he lets out a little chuckle of pleasure, “there have been some unusual circumstances in the aftermath of the Russian attacks.” His tone starts to lose some of its jollity. “In fact,” he says, “I am fully planning on including a comprehensive appendix surrounding the issues of funding and the expectations of my job. I mean take the library. I’m slipping a hypnotist in as a grief counselor to confuse witnesses. I’m hijacking press releases. I’m undercover vetting the repair crew. And then on top of that I have to take a librarian and keep him undercover in a hospital while I wait for the bloody doctor I’ve got on retainer to get back from bloody Majorca so he can amputate an arm that’s suddenly gone fetal on the poor bastard and then look the other way.”

  “An arm that’s gone fetal?” That sounds both awful and exactly like what I’m after.

  “That’s just the bloody tip of the proverbial fucking iceberg. I’ve got replicating bookshelves. I’ve got folks going to pull a book off one shelf, finding it won’t move, but that they’ve ransacked a shelf across the other side of the room. I’ve got a candle that never burns itself out. I mean I’m having to deal with a veritable perpetual fucking motion machine, I’m having to contend with something that’s defying Newtonian laws of physics. Defying space and time? That’s the least of my bloody problems.”

  I think this must be how a pirate feels when his shovel strikes the treasure chest.

  “So,” I say, trying to keep my voice under control “that’s pretty much a yes on the spatial and temporal disturbances.”

  The little man eyes me, suddenly suspicious. “Maybe.”

  “Wait—” I say. “But you said.”

  “You’ll have to read the full report for me to actually confirm that.”

  “He’s mentally unhinged, Arthur! Fear for your safety, mate. He’s waiting for an opening!”

  I try to block Winston out.

  “I swear to you,” I say. “I am totally going to read your report.”

  The little man regards me from one bulging eye, then backs up. “Alright then.”

  “And when will the report be coming?” It’s my turn to be suspicious.

  “Well,” the man hedges. “It’s not like I can just vomit up three hundred and fifty pages of—”

  “Three hundred and fifty!” My incredulity cuts him off.

  “I knew it!” he gasps. “You’re not going to read it! You lied!”

  “No, no, no.” I hold out my hands, try to preserve the charade of sanity.

  “It’s the pruning shears for you! Run, Arthur, run!” I wish Winston didn’t sound so gleeful.

  “I explained.” The little man is wringing his hands. “I explained, I’m overburdened. It takes a long time to write a proper report. It’s not something that can be rushed. I have a lot on my plate.”

  “The Lithium’s wearing off, Arthur. Five, four, three…”

  “Shut up!” The little man screams at Winston.

  “I’m going to read it. I’m going to read it.” My hands are still out, fingers spread wide. But I’m glad I remembered to wear my gun today. “I promise you I’m going to read it.”

  The little man is breathing hard. He looks at me. “Swear on your mother’s grave?”

  “Of course.” Thank God my mum’s still alive and kicking, albeit in Australia.

  “I’ll know,” he says. And in this place who knows if he’s lying or not.

  “You will receive a full written response,” I say. Because we’ve clearly entered fantasy land at this point.

  This appears to mollify the little man somewhat.

  “It’s just,” I continue, “it’s very important. As quickly as it’s possible for you to get something to me is all. Allowing, of course,” I decide to cover my arse in case Winston isn’t exaggerating, “for the appropriate levels of quality to be met.”

  The little man regards me from under his narrow eyebrows.

  “I’m making no promises,” he says finally.

  “Whenever you can get it done. But it’s very important.”

  He nods, still wary.

  �
�I have to be going now,” I say.

  “Oh yeah, course you do,” Winston yells at me. “That’s it, abandon me. I never helped you out. I never trod on a Russian for you. You ever cleaned a person off your foot, Arthur? You ever had to do that?”

  “I cleaned your bloody foot, you whinging bastard!”

  The bickering chases me even after I firmly close the door and retreat down the long corridor to the elevators.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The temporary office of MI37 Co-Director Felicity Shaw

  “Hello, Arthur.” Felicity looks up distractedly from her computer monitor. She pushes her reading glasses up her nose, then pulls them off with a sigh. She pinches the bridge of her nose.

  “Is now not a good time?” God I hope it is one.

  “No worse than any other.”

  I smile sympathetically and take a seat. She’s set up her office the way it was in Oxford. Filing cabinets along one wall, plants along the shelves on another, daylight blubs clipped in place. It’s a reassuringly familiar look.

  “This is nice.” I gesture around. I’m itching to get to the point here, but I feel I need to give Felicity time to get into a receptive mood.

  She tries to force a smile and ends up grimacing. “It’s hard to appreciate it when I’m reviewing Coleman’s proposed cost-cutting measures.”

  “Ah.” I try to think of something more meaningful to say but I’m finding it hard to make small talk. So I just cut to the chase. “I’ve done some digging,” I say.

  Felicity shifts her weight, perhaps sits up a little straighter. “Something I can bring to George?”

  The way she says his name puts my teeth on edge, almost deferential, but Felicity made it clear—that’s the nature of the game now.

  “I think so,” I say. Except I don’t just think so, I know so. I have my smoking gun.

  “Tell me,” she says.

  So I tell her. I describe my journey to the storage room, my meeting with the cleanup guy, my questions. And then, in excruciating detail, I go over his answers. By the end, I’m tapping my hand against my thigh, emphasizing each point.

  “Residual,” tap, “temporal,” tap, “and spatial disturbances.” Tap. “Everywhere he looks.” Tap. “He can list them.” Double tap. I’m grinning like a child.