He saw now that it had been a mistake choosing opening day, an obvious one that a more professional employee of Mr. Diablo would never have made. Not that Diablo had any other employees with Miller’s unique talent. (Or, ability, as Miller preferred calling it. Talent would imply it was something he had learned, honed, like the playing of a violin or the painting of a canvas. He had discovered his ability the way one child realizes he can lift a rock that another can not.)
But he had been anxious to get this over with quickly. And he had wanted to please Mr. Diablo. And he had wanted the money an appreciative Diablo would produce in return.
This would be a popular exhibit for some time, Miller reasoned. And besides...even if he took the painting in full view of everyone, how could they know he was the one responsible? They might think it had been stolen through a purely mechanical teleportation instead. Or they might even, impressed, believe that the disappearance was all part of the artist’s intention, and patiently (and vainly) wait for it to rematerialize.
Only when he moved away, into the mouth of a mellowly dim hallway to other exhibits, did he study the painting as reproduced in his brochure, the better to focus its image in his mind’s hunting scope. The painting portrayed the Choom god Raloom on his death bed, his eyes staring emptily at the viewer, hospital monitors arranged around him. Though Minh Nguyen had no doubt captured here his anxiety about his own impending death, it was Miller’s old neighbor Michael Templin that immediately sprang to his mind.
The pamphlet said that, like many of his paintings, Nguyen had mixed some of his own blood and spit into the paints (in younger days he had managed semen as well). Miller hoped that Mr. Diablo was merely an art lover, or black market art dealer, and that he didn’t intend to clone Minh Nguyen from the blood and hold him for ransom money.
But really, that wasn’t his concern. His task was simply to deliver the artwork to his new boss.
Miller saw himself living in a clean, spacious apartment in the Elysium Fields sector of Punktown. And he saw himself driving a brand new hovercar, painted a fashionable if elusive shrain. These were things he could not fold up like origami and hide in the Chest. Well, perhaps the car—he had been afraid to “internalize”, as he often thought of it, so large an object. But even in the case of his expensive shrain suit, which he could have easily whisked inside him, he had wanted to pay with money. Only his handgun had he lately stolen for himself—simply so that it was not registered to him if, Raloom forbid, he ever had to use it.
As a boy, he had once stolen a toy from another child. The guilt of that act of lustful greed haunted him to this day. In fact, he was reminded of it now. As he was, probably, every time he “internalized”.
Somehow, stealing for another man seemed less difficult, less fraught with guilt. These were not items he himself coveted. Somehow, he convinced himself that he was only doing a job.
* * *
Naturally, a number of the artists of these pieces had appeared today in person, so as to be admired by the public as their artworks were. Not pressing forward to meet them like others did, Miller watched some of them interact from a distance. There was Trygve Botnen, a Tikkihotto in a red silken robe who Miller thought glanced his way once and nodded in approval at his shrain suit. Holding a glass of champagne, his laugh as contrived a creation as his pulsing sculptures of cloned flesh, was Julian White, who wore an obsidian-black suit of tight-fitting armor made, Miller overheard, from the chitin of one of the extradimensional Coleopteroid race. Walking works of art, some of these people were.
An odd headdress of sorts, bobbing above the heads of other artists and their admirers, caught Miller’s stealthy eye. Then, through a gap in the massed bodies, he saw its owner. It was Dirk Berger, whose painting of Raloom sitting cross-legged in space and biting into this planet Oasis like an apple plucked in Eden had been rendered in child-like primary colors, crude and annoying. Berger was attired in fairly conventional clothing, but like a bishop’s miter he wore a tall conical cage of sorts strapped to the top of his head. Something batted itself silently against the tight bars of this mobile silvery cage, and drifting a little bit closer, Miller saw what it was.
Inside the cage was a huge butterfly, fluttering about futilely every now and then when it wasn’t clinging to the bars and slowly fanning its wings. An eye had been painted onto each wing, unless it was a natural pattern meant to frighten off predators, but it looked too synthetic. And the color of the wings themselves: a gray that was almost green, or green that was almost gray, with just a suggestion of yellow lurking it its oblique mix. There was no mistaking. At least as far as Miller could tell, the butterfly’s wings had been painted or dyed the color shrain.
An admiring woman poked her finger in at the butterfly, trying to stroke one wing. Miller almost called out to stop her. He remembered his mother once warning him that touching a butterfly’s wing would rub off pollen-like scales, damaging it. Dirk Berger didn’t try to stop her, seemed to enjoy her caress as if it were directed at his own body.
Alarmed, the insect fluttered again, bashed itself into the opposite bars so that even from here Miller could hear the tick of its body, the dry rustling of its wings. He found himself more than annoyed, as he had been by Berger’s painting. He wanted to go to him and yank that cage right off his head until its strap dug into him under the chin.
But he flicked his eyes back to the last painting of Minh Nguyen. He had a job to do. He was wasting time. He was stalling.
With all these people, there was no other way to do this. His method was not to break in after hours, hang down the ceiling from a cord, dressed all in black. There were high and low tides of bodies around the painting but due to its very importance it was never unattended. He focused on it from a little bit behind the big square column, and only waited for enough of a lull in bodies to see it clearly.
Imprinted behind his eyes, the painting was now like a reproduction, a photograph in a page of a pamphlet. He took hold of that page and ripped it slowly free of its binding. Then, the page still in his hands, he began his meticulous ritual of folding, like the folding of a flag at a military funeral. In the background, a mild distraction, he wondered if his old neighbor Mr. Templin had had such a military funeral when he passed away not long after Miller had assisted him.
Smaller, tighter the packet. Then, the nimble insertion of it into the secret navel. And it was gone from the wall where it hung. It was hung, instead, on a wall in the black vastness of his Chest.
He thought he heard an “ooh”, perhaps of admiration, and maybe a gasp, some murmurs, but he was already turning away (not too quickly), already floating again toward that dim hallway, so as to wind his way out of the museum. But not far ahead of him, he saw Dirk Berger again, with his cage of a headdress. Without even really making a conscious decision, but with the tiniest of smiles on his face, Miller locked his eyes on that cage. He took hold of it in hands stronger, more sure, than his physical hands. Almost out of spite, he folded it.
He had never tried internalizing a living thing before. He had been afraid of what might happen to the animal—or person—if he did so. But could the butterfly’s fate be any worse than it was now? If he unintentionally killed it by folding it, storing it away in the perhaps airless enclosure of the Chest, it would be a mercy.
As Miller left Berger behind him, he heard his exclamation as the weight was relieved from his skull. He imagined the artist’s hands batting at his head like the wings of his stolen pet.
-Six-
Miller’s apartment was in Subtown, that portion of Punktown which had been built below the streets to maximize space, since the city could only be built up and out so far. Subtown didn’t nearly extend to the limits that its upper twin did, but was still like a small city in itself. Due to Subtown’s fossilized sky of concrete, even the buildings were built on a miniature scale; mostly rows of flat-roofed tenements, many with shops at street level. Miller lived on the top floor of one of these buildings, cramped
in a block of almost identical structures, although his was faced in stucco that was painted a lime green. Easy to pick out when one was stumbling home from the bookstore/pub at the corner.
When he flicked on his kitchen light so as to make coffee, a mass of writhing white spaghetti in his sink began slithering rapidly down the drain...like a brain coming unknotted one convolution of tissue at a time. The first time he’d seen the worms, he had indeed taken them for noodles until he realized he hadn’t eaten pasta in a week. He smiled at the last of them as it wriggled down the drain, as if to say to them, go on, have your fun...I’ll be out of this place soon. An apartment in Elysium Fields, up in the sun.
Having manually started up his coffee maker, its vocal operation feature no longer functioning, Miller turned casually to his kitchen table so he could deposit there Minh Nguyen’s final painting, of a moribund god Raloom.
His fingertips pressed into the tiny peephole that looked into a much larger, who knew how vast, chamber. His storage attic, his museum within. After a few moments, they felt the compacted pill that he had pressed in there, like drugs tucked into a smuggler’s rectum. His fingertips had the edge of the pill, and began to draw it out.
Somehow, as if it were too large though he knew it was no larger than any other he had ever placed inside him, Miller could not get the pellet past the opening of his visualized navel.
Forehead rumpling, he closed his eyes to better concentrate. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was rushing the process, not focusing properly. He removed his ectoplasmic fingers, drew in a breath, then inserted them again. Deeper this time, widening the lips of the hole. Again, he found the pellet. Closed on it. Slowly, delicately this time, sought to extract it.
Again, it would not come clear. It lodged at the rim of the orifice. Not that it was too big to slip through...it wasn’t that. He opened his eyes, his brow even more furrowed. What, then?
This had never happened to him before.
Again he tried. Again he failed. Wait an hour, he told himself. Have something to eat. Take a nap. Try again in an hour...
He was too impatient, too alarmed to do any of those things. He darted, panic mounting, into another room. Tried again there, as if maybe some wavelength from a kitchen appliance might be blocking him though he had never experienced any such interference in the past. He attempted to withdraw the painting in his bedroom, to lay the painting of Raloom on his death bed onto his own bed. But it wouldn’t come.
Why was this happening? What could be different? Surely the gallery couldn’t have set up some sort of security barrier to prevent teleportation...after all, he had successfully removed the painting. And how could they find a means to hamper his technique when as far as he knew there was no one else gifted with such an aberration?
In the small living room, where he had again failed, Miller looked over at the aquarium screen saver program on his vidtank. Lisa Wallen or Bird or some other of Mr. Diablo’s representatives would be contacting him soon, within the hour, to find out how things had gone. To set up a meeting for the trade. Painting for a great reward of money.
What could be different?
Frantically, pacing the room like a panther in its too small pen, like a butterfly banging its wings against its cage, Miller replayed his visit to the Hill Way Galleries in his mind.
He stopped abruptly. A butterfly, banging its wings against its cage.
Never before, since even his childhood when he’d first stumbled upon his ability, had he dared to internalize a living thing. And now, today, he had done so...on a sudden, half-conscious whim.
“Ohh,” Miller exhaled softly. “Oh no...”
How could such a small thing disrupt his ability? How could it block the removal of the inanimate objects secreted away in the Chest? Desperately, Miller tried to remove the money he stored in there. He fared no better. He sought to extract the folded up package of his sparkly red pistol. He could not. At last, his fingers found the cage he had stolen off the very head of artist Dirk Berger, the cage in which that poor shrain-tinted butterfly with eyes on its wings had been imprisoned. If he could only remove this object, that was plugging the hole, in essence, for all the others...
He took hold of it. He pulled it easily to the edge of the opening. And there, it would budge no further.
“Ohh...no...” Miller whispered.
-Seven-
Punctually, an agent of his employer called him on his VT not long after his last attempt to remove the Nguyen painting. The face that filled his vidtank’s screen belonged to a man named Scott Badger, whom Miller had not dealt with personally before but he knew he was of a higher rank than Bird and Lisa. Badger’s looming face was one big plastic smile, like a nearly realistic sculpture from the art museum. “Hello, Mr. Miller.”
“Hello, Mr. Badger.”
“How did our errand go this afternoon?”
“Ahh...it went well...up to a point...”
“A point.” The plastic smile lost some of its Raloom-like width. “At what point might that be?”
“Well...I successfully bagged the groceries...” (in case the line was being intercepted) “...but, um...” Miller fumbled for more analogies to use “...but I can’t get the groceries out of the car.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s in the Chest. I know it’s there. But for some reason...” why give away the particulars of his foolish action? “...I can’t get it to come out of the Chest. It’s stuck in there.”
“Well, Mr. Miller—of course that won’t do,” said Mr. Badger mildly, though his smile had entirely melted by now.
“I’ll keep trying, of course,” Miller hastened to add, taking an unconscious step closer to the wall-length screen for urgent emphasis, “I’ll keep at it. But it...it’s going to take more time...”
“And obviously, you don’t know how much more time.”
“No, sir.”
“Well...this is very disappointing, of course. We didn’t know that there could be a problem of this nature...”
“And neither did I! Look...I’ll keep trying. And I’ll call you...”
“No. Call Bird.”
“Right; I’ll call Bird as soon as I have it.”
“And you will have it, won’t you, Mr. Miller? You will eventually have it?”
“Yes sir. It’s just a fluke. It’s never, ever happened before...”
“Bad timing, for it to happen now. Very well. I’ll tell Bird to expect you. And hopefully—soon.”
-Eight-
Because he was hungry and had nothing in his fridge, but mainly because he had felt that his small flat was getting smaller and smaller, folding up like one of his pellets, Miller walked down the street to Robert’s Deli for a sprouts sandwich and a side of fried dilkies, served to him by Robert himself, who made a good sandwich for someone born with bony tumors instead of eyes. Sitting at one of the establishment’s few tables, directly in front of the window, he alternately watched vehicles pass in the street and customers queue up to the counter. A pretty college student wearing a T-shirt that featured the popular music star Dave Owens, both of them Earthers like himself, bought a salad and took it to a table not far from his. She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, staining it lightly with flourescent orange lipstick, and lay the half-crumpled napkin to one side. Miller shifted his surreptitious gaze from her pretty face to the stained napkin. Only Dave Owens seemed to be watching what he was doing.
The young woman didn’t notice that the napkin was missing until she wanted to dab her lips again. She looked under the table briefly, then simply plucked another one out of a dispenser on her table.
Miller sensed the tightly folded bit of paper inside him. He imagined his astral fingertips could feel the paper’s texture, even the waxy residue of her lips, despite the tightness of the package. But when he began to pull it free, so as to unfold it, so as to materialize it beside his own plate, it wouldn’t come. Just wouldn’t come.
Was it more than just the insect,
he wondered? Had it complicated matters that Nguyen added his blood, his spit, bodily fluids to his paints? No: expired cells. Miller was sure that dead skin cells, oil from fingertips, had marred every object he had ever internalized. No: it was that butterfly. That poor, damned butterfly. First trapped by Berger. Now trapped by himself, even more cruelly.
The college student left and he left shortly after her, though they walked in opposite directions, and when Miller got to the lime-colored tenement building he found two men sitting on its front stoop drinking coffee from disposable cups. When they saw him coming, one nudged the other and they stood up. For an insane moment, Miller thought he should turn and run in the direction that the young woman had taken. Instead, he fought to keep his step regular and casual, and he even smiled when the two men moved toward him. He recognized them now as two more of Mr. Diablo’s cadre; the taller man, with his eyeballs dyed metallic blue to match his metallic blue hair, was called Mean, and the short muscular mutation with the ugly tapir-like snout and lidless, runny eyes was nicknamed Stack. Mean smiled—such friendly people in Diablo’s little family—and maybe the snort from Stack’s little trunk held a similarly affable meaning.
“Hey, Millie,” said Mean in greeting. “We were worried when we saw you weren’t home. We thought you’d jumped a tube to the Outback Colonies or something.”
“No, here I am,” Miller chuckled, spreading his arms. “Just went for a bite.”
The mutant’s snout snuffled as if testing Miller’s breath for the truth in this claim. He grunted, “Any luck digging out that package, Miller?” He didn’t sound so affable after all.
“Not yet. I’ve been trying. I told Mr. Badger I’d call Bird if I had any luck...”
“That was two hours ago.”
“I’m working on it, really. I’m experimenting. See, I can still take objects in...I just can’t get them back out again.”
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