The Last Cabal

Monday, February 03, 2003 :::

"Hey buddy, you gotta smoke?" came the raspy question from a disheveled man, a vagrant by the looks of him, sitting on the short wall surrounding the rusted and derelict public fountain. "Nice suit, by the way."

The man in the suit started for a second at the intrusion of words into his mind. He let his head fall as if in slow motion and he took himself in. He was, in fact, wearing a black suit. He wondered for a moment if he'd come from a fancy party or something. The jacket and pants looked slightly dirty and the white shirt underneath seemed rumpled as if he'd been sleeping in them. His collar hung open and without tie, though, and he imagined a man in a suit just like him at some debutante's ball, dancing wildly, drunk on liquor and women, swinging his tie around his head like a lasso . . .

"Did you hear me, buddy? Smoke?"

'Smoke?' he thought. 'Do I smoke?' His hands moved slowly, as if through water, from pocket to pocket, eventually finding a pack of Camel Lights inside his black suit jacket. "I guess I do," he said, proffering the pack to the vagrant.

"Thanks, buddy. You gotta light, too? Or should I ignite this with the powers of my mind?" The comment was followed by a silent chuckle as the vagrant enjoyed his own sarcasm.

His hands moving a little swifter now, the suited man pulled out a cigarette for himself and put the pack away. He found a bic in there in the process, pulled it out, and put a flame to the end of the cigarette, now perched awkwardly on his lips. He puffed briefly to light it, then held the lighter to the cigarette dangling from the vagrant's cracked lips. Dropping the lighter into his pants pocket and trying a good solid drag, he coughed violently and experienced the sickening rush of unfamiliar nicotine high. The vagrant laughed out loud this time.

"Maybe you should just give the rest of those to me," he said, slightly extending his hand in hopes of the donation. The suited man dropped his cigarette, stepped on it, and spit a few times to get the tobacco taste out of his mouth. "You don't really need those smokes, do ya buddy?" reiterated the vagrant with a wave of his hand. The suited man paused his expectoration and looked up. His hand found the pack of Camels and he and handed them to the vagrant. "Hey, thanks, buddy. You just made my day. It's getting so an apartmentally-challenged citizen like myself can't even get a pack o' smokes for less than seven bucks anymore! What's your name, by the way?"

'What is my name?' thought the man in the suit. His eyes closed tightly and his face drifted up toward the sky as he thought hard for a second, trying to recall. 'I don't have a clue. How strange.' His eyes opened to the sight of the marquee of the Paramount Theater across the street. TONIGHT ONLY, it said, SOLD OUT . . . "Al Green," read the man in the suit.

"What's that, buddy?"

"Green . . . Al Green. That's my name." He turned to walk away.

"Oh, just like the soul man, eh?" called the vagrant after him.

"Yeah, just like the soul man," said Al and he walked down Pine Street towards the ocean in search of something to eat.

**

The buzzing in his head was getting louder. It had been doing that for about two days of wandering around downtown Seattle- not so much an annoying buzz, but a persistent -insistent- buzz, tugging at him to satisfy it, like an itch. He played with the noise a little, heading south and then north or east, seeing if the buzz would tell him if he was hot or cold. He found he could make it a little louder sometimes when he walked south toward the industrial section of the city. The buzz was still too faint, though, for him to really get a fix on where it might be leading. So he waited . . . and tried to remember.

Nothing significant would come to mind. Al Green just kept drawing elaborate pictures of himself in all sorts of wild situations: that of a cold-footed groom, out of his mind, going on a month-long bender, or a crooked businessman or lawyer who upset the wrong people and got knocked hard on the head, or even an ex-international spy who’s government didn’t have the guts to kill him. But no one idea seemed any more real or likely than any other.

He had taken inventory of himself on several occasions. He was all there, in the flesh anyway, no obvious physical problems. He didn't feel ill. And it wasn't as if his mind was gone. He knew things, like most of the state capitals . . . Sacramento, California - Austin, Texas - Boise, Idaho . . . like how the earth spun on its axis and circumlocuted the sun, and he even knew weird, obscure stuff, like how to tell time by looking at shadows and how to read someone’s eyes and mouth to tell what they're thinking. 'Perhaps I was some kind of cultural anthropologist who would live for months at a time with primitive tribes who could only communicate with me through facial expression,' he thought. But he couldn't recall any specific memories from his life. He imagined someone taking an electromagnet and rubbing it across a reel of videotape inside his head.

A search of his pockets had yielded a pack of chewing gum, a strange futuristic-looking all-purpose tool -almost like a Leatherman-, a stout wad of twenty dollar bills, -naturally- no wallet or identification of any kind, and four bullets. The metal of the bullets against the palm of his hand seemed to conjure a picture of a long, sleek, black handgun. He was still unable to tell if the image was anything more than a projection of his vacant mind. He tried to focus on the weapon, but further detail was not forthcoming. His inventory also noted some odd, black tattoos, looking sort of techno-tribal, running up his left leg and a rather complex digital wristwatch around his left wrist. The watch weighed almost nothing, was affixed rather firmly to his arm, and had all sorts of unmarked buttons and readouts on it. It felt rather significant to whatever remnants of his memory were floating around in his subconscious.

Al sat on a bench in the shadow of a big elm tree nestled in a secluded corner of Freeway Park. The sun drained out of the sky on another late summer evening and once again he trying to gather the bits of his mind together. Nothing about his situation made any sense to him. He wasn't sure, but judging by length of the stubble on his cheeks, he'd been sleeping in the park and wandering the streets for a week. Though a few of the twenties were now gone, spent on meals of fast food, coffee, and more gum (he found it natural and comforting to chew his way through around twelve sticks of Doublemint a day) he had plenty of cash left. Casting a quick eye around his corner of the park ensure he wasn't being observed, he flipped through his stash, estimating it's value at around six hundred dollars. It would be easily enough to get himself a room in a motel or something, but he felt an overwhelming compulsion to stay in the protective anonymity of the street. 'Checking into a hotel would be about the quickest way to get myself killed,' he thought. He had no idea where that thought had come from. He just knew it would be best to tough it out where no one asked any questions except "Can you spare some change?" or "Do you got a smoke?" After seven days, even in a suit, he was starting to blend in pretty well with the unfortunates who asked such questions.

His money tucked safely away, Al took another good look at his strange watch. His initial glance merely confirmed his prior assessments that he must have used it for considerably more than telling the time. The face of it was almost as esoteric as a flight control panel on a F-16 fighter. There seemed to be sorts of interesting readouts blinking across the screen -numbers, letters, and odd symbols- constantly changing, and constantly alluding to things he had no clue about. He unhooked the band to better examine the thing, but he found it wouldn't come off his wrist. The ends of the band hung limply, but the watch itself remained stuck to him. He tugged lightly at the watch and felt a tingle and a pulling sensation in the flesh of his arm. He slightly lifted an edge of the watch and peaked underneath it. After the brief surprise and confusion, he wasn't sure how he felt about seeing lots of tiny wires -some thick, some thin, in various colors- coming out the back of the watch, going through his skin and running up the meat of his arm.

The skin didn’t seem particularly stressed or irritated by the puncture of the wires, it just seemed have grown around them, like hair follicles. Al didn’t much enjoy the feeling up his arm, but he overcame his discomfort long enough to give the watch a decent pull. The sensation ran all the way up his neck and made his ear feel strange. He let go of the watch, fought off a moment’s nausea and brought his hand up to his neck. His fingers found the base of his ear and detected the slight bundle of wires under his skin, spreading out and going inside his skull with the cartilage.

What this might indicate about him, Al had no idea. He stared down at the face of his watch for a while, prodding the cables in his neck and trying to make sense of the symbols changing and flashing on it. As they moved through progression after progression, he began to see patterns emerging. As if this were yet another piece of information his brain instinctively possessed, he began to understand how to tell time by the characters and patterns. There was a main section that seemed to represent how fast nuclear particles were decaying in various atomic clocks buried in underground labs around the world. A corner display apparently indicated the speed the earth was rotating on its axis, its position relative the sun and other heavenly bodies, and exactly where on the planet the great line of dawn was burning its way across the landscape. After a while of interpreting the obscure semiotics, he found that he could look away from the watch and still feel the patterns ticking by, informing him of the time.

He leaned back against the cooling wood of the bench and watched the night gather, practicing his ability to mark time.

**

The buzzing was his whole world now. It became his food and water, his every thought. It had been developing a steady rhythm for days and now seemed to have become midwife to some sort of personal, temporal birth- making the walls of the alley he had wandered into pulse like arteries. He was working his way toward a sum of moments, being pushed through the shadowy night - past the smell of oil and a chain-link fence guarding the cars in a parking garage - past the funk of two sizable green dumpsters being picked over by a couple discriminating alley cats. He was being pushed to the end of the alley, perhaps to be born into the street.

His feet carried him to the sidewalk and around the corner out of the alley but he had not yet emerged at his destination. On the corner of a building across the street his eyes saw a small door with a round, porthole style window in it. 'I will be born somewhere on the other side of that door.' He knew not why, but just knew. The buzz called him to the door and he looked up for a moment before some unseen drive propelled him through it. "HELLSPIT CAFE" the sign had glowed to him in neon, it, too, pulsing in red to the beat of blood through the veins of the city.

Al found himself in a low-lit, half-filled cafe with everything done in dark red and black. The rhythmic buzz seemed to be coming off of everything in the place. The whole room expanded and contracted and he understood he had at last found the heart of what he was looking for. This place had been calling him and he had found it -and still it pulsed, and more than ever, pumping something -energy or fate, if there was such a thing- through the building, in and out of the world around it.

His wide eyes searched through this and saw people chatting at tables in the middle of the place, whispering in dim booths along two walls, and laughing at a long bar against a third. A sign above the bar screamed, "COFFEE, IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER!." A door at the end of the bar read, "Employees Only" and as his eyes settled on it, Al felt himself being pushed again as a force were heaving him forward. He stumbled for a moment before his feet caught up with his compulsion and carried him past the bar to the 'employees only' door. He felt naked and new and completely separate from the souls around him. He willed them to pay no attention to the pre-born epiphany in their bohemian midst and they seemed more than happen to ignore his existence as he drifted across the room.

'Perhaps I'm not real because I haven't been born yet,' came his thought while, at the same time, everything he knew flew in the face of that proposition. His legs carried him to the door and his hand pushed it open while voices of reason were screaming a cacophony of counter-arguments that rose and rose until they lost their meaning and became instruments in an expanding symphonic movement in his head. He passed through the doorway, seeing stars and white noise in his periphery, hearing the crescendo of consciousness build to an explosion. He moved forward to the smell of stale cigarette smoke and a curtain at the end of a short hall. As the mental music reached its peak, every assumption in Al's mind crumbled to dust and was blown away by the crushing note of clarity the echoed through his psyche. Al's vision was all static and red as his arm swept aside the curtain and stepped into a small room. The note slowly began to fade and his vision to resolve to the sound of one voice repeating a question.

"If you feel like giving me a reason not kill you, now's your chance."

**

Al stood speechless, either unwilling or unable to disturb the stunning stillness he'd been denied for the past four days. He only slowly shook his head, his eyes riveted to the man addressing him, through a cloud of cigarette smoke, blending into a black leather couch with his long, black leather coat. A quick shuffling noise to his left and the chill of hard metal pressing to his neck alerted Al to the presence of someone else in the room. He turned his head toward his would-be executioner, looking over dark gunmetal at a young man standing to the side of the door in a black t-shirt with 'Security' printed in white over his left pectoral muscle.

As if on instinct, Al found himself saying, "You're just a boy. You don't want to shoot me."

The guard's hand began to tremble and his face slid from resolve into a childish pout. He sniffled as his nose began to run and tears welled up in his eyes.

"Put the gun down, it's going to be okay," Al's took on a reassuring, fatherly tone.

The guard lowered his weapon and his head. He brought his empty hand up and buried his face in it, weeping softly through his fingers. Al turned his attention back to the apprising gaze of the man on the couch, cocking a dark eyebrow in question.

"Does your kind believe in coincidence, Mr. Green?" asked the man. Through the heavy, shifting haze of cigarette smoke, he leaned forward and flipped a quarter into the air.

"I don't know . . . I suppose," replied Al as his eyes were drawn to the flash of silver rising up and then down. The coin spun in a high arc and dropped quickly to the table between them, bouncing twice and spinning, wild and erratic, around the dark polish wood of the table.

"You shouldn't," whispered the man, his eyes, too, trained on the coin as it slowed it's spin and came to a stop in the center of the table, standing perfectly on it's edge. "You're just in time. Have a seat. Randall . . . you may step outside if you need to compose yourself."

Randal went out through the curtain and Al cautiously stepped around the side of the table, lowering himself to another section of the long couch. He kept his gaze on the man, squinting his eyes from a momentary sting as he moved within the edge of the smoke haze. The man appeared to be in his early thirties, had light brown, close-cropped hair in an almost military cut, and his right eye had well defined lines around it as if it had endured years of Clint Eastwood style squinty stares. Coming over his left shoulder, then down inside his coat, ran what appeared to be a thin chain. Several wraps of it could be seen stacked lower around the man's torso.

The chain-man scrunched up his right eye and drew long and deep through the cigarette held pinched by his lips, just off the center of his mouth. Al sat in silence, just observing him and finally, Chain-man spoke. "What brings you to my table, Mr.Green?"

Al's cocked eyebrow jumped again. "Have we met?"

"It is by my grace alone that you are not dead, Mr.Green. My grace is extended right now because I am quite impressed by the sheer audacity you're displaying by sitting right there . . . on my couch. You have me at a disadvantage, Mr.Green, in that the amount of balls it must've taken you far outweighs my desire to kill you on sight. You've roused my curiosity."

"How do you know my name?"

"Don't belittle my intelligence. I know your name, likely, the same way you know mine. It's remarkable what one can do to find information these days. Why are you here?"

Al felt a slight prod in his psyche, a mild compulsion to tell this man everything he knew. Simultaneously, it was as if someone had just tried to play his mind like a flipbook. He pushed the intrusion away easily and slammed a mental barrier down. He suddenly seemed to know how to prevent something like that from happening again.

"You had your guard down for a moment, Mr.Green. Not something I expected, but an interesting sign. You've lost something recently, haven't you. And you want me to help you find it. And you have a lot of questions. Interesting."

"Can you?" Al's heart began to beat faster.

"Mr. Green, you're an intelligent man. You would understand the consequences of walking in here like you have. And we both know you and your associates have yet to slip any traps past my defenses. The fact that you're here, now, can only indicate you are not yourself at the moment. If your mind is what you've lost, whether I can help you recover it is an interesting question indeed."

::: posted by Mr.Concinnity at 1:14 AM