<<< Back Table of Contents 29 Last Painter As he neared the end of a long life, Timmins was nearsighted and almost deaf. He looked just as he had at twenty, only now his hair was white. He sat in a stiff wooden chair with a blanket on his lap, a thick photo album balanced on top of it. He was scrutinizing a picture of a smiling blond-haired boy on a bicycle. "I knew this boy, Anton. Other people knew him too—but not like me, I don't think, not like me. We had an understanding that we never talked about, but I'm as sure of it as I am of this Earth. What am I saying? A lot surer than that. To each of us, the other was more real than anything else. That meant that any object, any reality that got in the way could be swept aside and we would be together, without effort, like the first time we met. We both knew it. We knew it from the first day. Nothing in this world could come between us—not ambition, not love of another, not even death." He slipped the photo back into the album and turned the page. He came to an image of Anton standing in a brightly colored shirt in a summer garden, smiling squint-eyed into the sun. In this photo, Anton was about twenty. Timmins took it in his frail hands. It was the day that Anton had visited him at the mental hospital, the day they'd decided to buy the house where he still lived. He grew wistful. "I begged him to stay with us, but he said no. He said it was time to cross over. I said I'd go with him, but he said no to that, too. So who am I to argue? I only wish he could have been born in a world that was worthy of him. It's taken me fifty years to finish my life's work. For him it was a few minutes, a flash in the pan." He rubbed his thumb along the photo's edge. "I have memories, of course, and even evidence. But after all these years, I can't say any more how much of it was real. I had a flimsy grip on reality in those days. Sometimes I ask myself if I invented the whole thing. It was only with Anton's help, and as a result of his acts, that I finally came to understand who I was. And by then, he was gone." He shook his head in regret. "In a way, Anton died to make me what I am. He died so that Timmins might live. It's too convenient, really. I suppose that's why I wonder if it ever happened." He placed the photo back in the album and closed the cover, folding his hands over it. Was his interlocutor still there? It didn't matter. He went on teasing out the streamers of his thought. "There was a time in my life when I knew what everything meant. Every detail had a meaning for me that was obvious and precise. A dog's fur matted down by fog on a misty morning, each tile or grain of wood at Ruby's Place—it was there for a reason, it was meant to be understood. Naturally, that got to be a bit distracting after a while. I'm glad those days are gone. The meanings are still there, of course, but today I hardly notice them." Gazing out the window, he fell asleep. • • • In the weeks following the raid on Anton's studio, the main subject of controversy in Portland was what had happened to him. The newspapers reported that he'd learned of the raid and taken flight. A lot of people were unsatisfied with this story, so they came up with theories of their own. Some said he'd poisoned himself as the police closed in, like in the movie about him. Others argued that he'd been captured and was being held in a secret prison, where the authorities were reprogramming him to serve their interests. Of those who believed he'd escaped, some insisted that he'd died later in a shootout, while others claimed he'd taken a new identity and was living with a girl in Mexico. A brief story appeared in the Portland Oregonian a month after the raid, but there was nothing in it to make the connection to Anton. STANDOFF ENDS IN DEATH (AP)—A fugitive vowing he would rather die than go to jail held off police for 14 hours, then killed his teenage wife who stayed by his side and himself when officers stormed the house in a tear-gas barrage. "OK, we're checking out of here," Steven Banning, who had described himself as a "wonderful" and a "beautiful" person, told police by telephone early Sunday morning. Officers fired tear gas into the house in Brandon, Utah, about 200 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, heard two shots fired and broke into the home where they found the bodies of Banning, 19, and the woman he called his wife, Ann Vermeer, 18, inside the building. Anton would have preferred his own epitaph. After several days of high-profile appearances The New Boy Wonder disappeared from view Leaving no trace. The back of his head was last seen Vanishing from a parking lot at high speed. In the months that followed, Anton was forgotten. Chaos Theory Records resolved its legal troubles and found a new owner. The success of Jitterkid made the company fat and powerful, since the new band turned out to be bigger than Anton had ever been. Kliff prospered as he always had, developing his network of contacts. Jitterkid proved he could recognize talent, and he became the biggest promoter on the West Coast. He was a player in local politics, and at one point a protest candidate for mayor. Vince, Blake, Cynthia and Travis revived the Psychic Rangers, going on to record several new albums. The House of Mysticism reopened with new icons, Debbie and Dan the Celestial Twins, but without Anton as Harry Mellow, it had no hope of influencing Portland's cultural scene. Once its sponsors realized the pointlessness of what they were doing, it returned to being the New Jerusalem Chapel, now a Korean evangelical church. Copies of Dark Blossoms and Why Psychic Hygiene? appeared in antiquarian bookstores, along with old issues of Rebel Youth. It was Vince who recognized the value of these relics, keeping Anton's name alive among the hipster elite. Zombieland itself changed, becoming Asian working class. Vince's bookshop remained, an eccentric reminder of techno-primitive times. Becky moved in with Timmins, thrown together like two survivors on a raft. They both understood that Anton was gone for good. Becky wondered what she could have done to change the outcome. If she'd been more understanding, maybe Anton wouldn't have acted so rashly. Yet she was annoyed with herself for feeling guilty. It wasn't her fault that Anton had gotten himself into trouble. Seeing how it upset her to be reminded of Anton's misfortune, Timmins refrained from making any paintings of Anton during the time they were together. He was sure their relationship would last, but after a year or so, it became clear that Becky's overprotectiveness was unhealthy for them both. She left to marry an insect biologist. Timmins took up painting Anton again, but without the same urgency as before. The Anton in his paintings grew increasingly superherolike, with hard-to-believe powers. In fact, he sometimes lost track of the reality on which the myth was based. He began to feel that Anton must have been a childhood fantasy, an imaginary friend he'd outgrown. It helped to believe this, because he was convinced he'd betrayed Anton by outliving him. He'd made his peace with the world, which Anton had refused to do. Over time he persuaded himself that Anton, his soulmate from birth, was nothing but a dream. Anton dwindled in his mind to a distant memory, a thing to be wondered about or even forgotten. As a child, it had been Anton's ambition to move through the world without a trace, to leave nothing behind. He'd almost succeeded in being forgotten after his death, and if not for Timmins, his friend and betrayer, he would have been. But he'd asked Timmins to "stay behind and tell my story," so Timmins did his best. Techno-primitivism had come and gone, and with it the whole paraphernalia of that movement, so nothing remained of Anton's meteoric career, his sudden and surprising fame. Only Timmins' canvasses gave him a legacy. He became part of Timmins' myth as the Last Painter, the rebel who'd appeared at the dawn of Timmins' career to warn of dark days to come. To tell Anton's story, Timmins had to promote himself as a painter, something he would never have done otherwise. Becky helped him, as did his former psychiatrist Dr. Dan. As Dr. Dan had predicted while he was still at the mental hospital, the lurid bohemianism of his canvases was attractive to collectors on the East Coast. The publicity-hungry doctor helped him to make the connections, and after a handful of sales, he was invited to New York for his first gallery show. Becky was an enthusiastic helper, packing up his canvases for the trip to the big city, advising him on etiquette and how to dress. In New York he was hailed as a "self-taught visionary," because his style was a radical departure from what had gone before. He'd arrived on the scene at just the right moment, forcing collectors, critics, and established artists to adjust. He was given an East Village studio to stay in, which belonged to a famous painter who was out of town. The opening went nicely, because he knew enough to keep quiet and let people project their fantasies onto him. Afterwards, he went to a wine bar with some critics and curators, who discussed "post-structuralism" and "the body as signifier." When the party broke up, they hailed a cab for him, but he got out after a few blocks because he preferred to walk. He followed the sidewalks through mist and suspended rain, his long hair sticking out from beneath his tractor cap. A young man, small of stature, appeared on the otherwise deserted street. The boy had light hair and Puerto Rican features, and was whistling and gesturing to attract attention. Timmins stopped and blinked. "Dude, you got a cigarette? I'll give you twenty cents." The boy crossed the street but kept a parked car between them. He held two dimes across the hood of the car. "I have Drum." "Drum? Cool, great!" "If you'll wait a minute...." He took the pouch from his jacket and set it on the hood of the car. "You gonna roll me one?" the boy said in anguish. "Please, you've got to accept my twenty cents." "It's no problem...." He was already rolling. The boy held the money under his nose. "Well, if that's what you want." He pocketed the coins. "What kind of tobacco is that?" "Just regular tobacco, but you roll it yourself. It's really strong." "Strong? Great! I need some tobacco in my lungs right now." The boy fingered a small plastic protrusion in the modeling of the hood. "Why do they put these things on here? What do they put them here for? Well, I shouldn't say too much." Timmins handed him the cigarette, then studied him for a moment from beneath his cap. He was about eighteen, with some growth on his upper lip. He was fresh faced and a bit crazy-looking. Timmins imagined he was on some kind of drugs. The boy took off across the street without asking for a light. As he retreated he called out, "Take care of yourself, man. Don't get fucked up out here." Timmins wasn't worried. He paused to roll a cigarette for himself, and walked on. In the years that followed, he was increasingly seen as a seer and judged by standards all his own. Anton had pinned down the reason years before. "It isn't easy to make paintings that come true." That had been a cruel thing to say at the time, because the painting in question was of his family's death. But it was the truth. He had no special technique for seeing the future. He just painted what was in his mind's eye, and sooner or later it happened. Sometimes it bothered him that his imagination was so precise. When people spoke about the "photographic quality" of his work, they didn't mean his style, which was chaotic and perverse, but his knack for capturing details as if he'd been there. Over time, it became obvious that some of these details anticipated real events. He tried to keep people from noticing this by painting things that were far in the future, but sometimes they came true sooner than he'd expected. This predictive quality became known as "the Timmins signature," and it prompted a closer study of all his work. There was some controversy among critics as to why so many of his early paintings were of Anton. One group insisted that Anton was a fictional character, and for this very reason, that the Anton paintings were his strongest work. They were "the creative outpouring of a raw young talent," as opposed to "the crowd-pleasing, socially relevant later work." The opposing view was that since a number of Timmins' paintings had proven true, all of his paintings should all be taken as records of real events. Unless the Anton canvasses could be shown to be an exception, it would be best to treat them as a documentary record. This led specialists to seek proofs of Anton's existence, but the argument was never settled. The costumes, band equipment, and nightclub interiors were historically accurate, and no anomalies could be found. On the other hand, no albums, posters, or press clippings ever surfaced to prove that Anton was real. Any documents that survived were kept out of public view, as if by common consent among their owners. Over time, even the paintings themselves grew hard to find. By then the global situation had begun to spin out of control, and people's attention turned to other things. Timmins' fame rested not on his portrayal of a young rock star, but on his ability to paint cataclysms that became real. By this stage of his career, he was known around the world as the Last Painter, or the Recluse Prophet. Though he rarely left Iowa, his paintings hung in Tokyo, S‹o Paulo and Berlin. Art historians made a game of identifying events in his work such as the Jakarta Rebellion, the Warsaw Plague, or the Urban Wars that ravaged the world like an untreatable virus. If it could be proven that a painting had been made before the event, its value became enormous. His portrayal of the military coup against President Giddens, in which Giddens was clearly recognizable as he was crushed by a tank, had been in a private collection when Giddens was still a little-known Southern preacher. Its value was rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, yet another sign of the desperate times in which people were living. Colonel Reinhold was at work behind the scenes, destabilizing global politics and financial markets with disinformation. He played with genetics and climate change, and established Video Control World, an urban surveillance system in which people could be instantly "made famous" for bad behavior because they were always on camera. Because of this, the major cities of the East and West Coast lapsed into paranoia, just as war and disease were causing vast numbers of immigrants to arrive from overseas. Due to overpopulation and a strained infrastructure, mob violence became common. In one city after another, martial law was declared as the only way to assure essential services. Stretched thin by the need to police civil society, the Army and National Guard were infiltrated by Reinhold's agents, who knew how to get the job done. The Unity Party gained power in cities across the Midwest, and dismantled all local government. Its chief propagandist, Anne Priestly, rose to be governor of Nebraska and promptly abolished her post, except for what she called "the shell of sovereignty" to be filled by the actions of volunteers. Her volunteers were mostly followers of the Psychic Hygiene Movement, which had been resurrected by its founder, Ethan Frump, in the years following Anton's death. Their guru was still Harry Mellow, only he no longer had Anton's face or voice. Instead he was portrayed around the world by young men of all races and creeds. He'd been known to address crowds in a hundred cities at once, each in their native tongue. "Talk to yourself. Talk to Harry Mellow," was a popular slogan. The Unity Party spread vigilantism and chaos throughout the Midwest. Public services collapsed. The highway system fell into disrepair, and the power grid stopped working. Rural people began to abandon their homes, because they could no longer protect their crops and families. Famine set in, aggravated by a lack of resources such as fuel or spare parts. The military intervened to keep things running, but they were undisciplined and unloved. They were controlled now by Reinhold, and most people saw them as an occupying force. They kept open certain roads and factories for their own purposes, but the rest of the land had no laws at all. Migration took place toward the two coasts, while the cities of the Heartland turned into empty shells. A few stubborn holdouts huddled together in the ruins, seeking protection against nomadic savages. • • • Reno grew up in the midst of all this, in a neighborhood that was all sweet pastels, the colors of lime and raspberry and lemon sherbet. There was an illusion of calm, of a life unchanged since his grandmother's time. Yet the city was emptier than it had once been. The factories were crumbling, the roads overgrown. The street outside his house hadn't been repaired in ages, and the sidewalks had cracks big enough to grow bushes in. He sat in the living room, looking out the picture window. The scene was washed out, glaring in the bright sunlight. The lawn was dry and brown because there hadn't been enough rain to keep it green through the summer. A large white sedan sat in the driveway, a relic they used only in emergencies due to lack of fuel. His mother, a kind, plain-looking woman of about forty, was bending to trim the roses, which were gathered in little plots surrounded by white rocks. She wore a pale cotton summer dress, her hair tied in a bun. The quiet was disturbed by the roar of a motorcycle. It raced onto the lawn, tearing up the dry grass. The rider wore a leather jacket and jeans, a bandana covering his face. He struck Reno's mother with a pipe, then sped away. She collapsed onto the driveway and a bloodstain gathered there. She was breathing, but unconscious. Reno ran to her side, gently touching her face. He put her in the car and took her to the hospital, but they told him the operation she needed was impossible. They had no medicines, no blood supplies. He watched her die in helpless fury. There was nothing to hold him now to the life he'd been leading. He vowed never again to trust appearances, or find himself in a situation where he was helpless. He would learn to survive. He drifted for a while, getting lost in the cracks of his decaying city. It was a river city in the Midwest, encircled by the old Interstate. Reinforced with barbed wire and machine-gun nests, the Interstate had become their first line of defense. Nothing moved there any more except military vehicles. Its entry points were guarded against marauding bandits, the pirates of the plain. Just inside was a fuel depot where caravans gathered before setting off under escort. There was an open-air market and squatter camp, where scavengers sold copper wire and used shoes with no laces. The warehouse district by the river was crumbling, turned into an unintentional garden. Long ago, boats and trains had come there to unload materials for a young nation. Now deer lived in the ruins. A few decadents and eccentrics hung on, surrounded by wreckage of the past. It was a district of ragtime bars, bathhouses, and talk of revolution. Reno moved into a brick building by the rail yards and decided to become a painter. He fashioned an airy studio with white walls, a wood floor, and a bathtub in the middle of the room. There was a mattress in the corner, and works in progress on easels or stands. He made paintings of clouds and fields of grain. In the same neighborhood was a carnival in an abandoned slaughterhouse, frequented by rowdies and young toughs. Its stalls contained sexual mercenaries catering to all tastes. He befriended a young huckster named Kliff, who ran a shooting gallery and proudly sold his body to the highest bidder. Together they frequented the Salon des Assassins, run by the Blues Singer. Her club was a gathering place for smugglers and subversives. It had a small stage and a piano, and a barman who resembled the famous revolutionary Lenin. In the back room, the talk was of gun running, drug trafficking and the porn trade. He was drawn to the rougher types because he could learn from them. To his surprise, he quickly surpassed them in ruthlessness, and soon they were listening to him because he was the one with the ideas. He helped to spark city-wide riots that went on for weeks, in which he distinguished himself with a highly profitable looting scheme. Building on that success, he became the boss of a truck smuggling ring that shipped porn and stolen goods as far away as Utah and South Dakota. They returned with manufactured items from the army-run factory towns, shirts and soap and plastic tubs. Smuggling was the only lifeline connecting the former cities of the Heartland, which had become little more than squatter camps. The military was spread too thin, and was harried by defections. Most of the soldiers were addicts, demoralized and hating those on the outside. Command lines were unclear, and sometimes the troops went on a rampage, burning crops, smashing houses and taking shots at fleeing families. The smugglers were the only ones who could keep communication open in a terrain of unpredictable checkpoints and roving gangs. It was easy to be generous with stolen wealth, so he sponsored fiestas at his compound, loading the tables with food and gifts. He gave out toys to children, and turkeys at Christmas. He helped a poor widow set up a generator, and gave her a year's supply of fuel. He was on his way to becoming a independent warlord with his own private fiefdom. Kliff watched his rise and cultivated it, urging him to strengthen his position by forming alliances with others more powerful. One day Kliff vanished, and returned a few weeks later with news of a West Coast operator named Reinhold. Reinhold needed someone to protect his eastern flank while he expanded across the Pacific. With Kliff as intermediary, the alliance was formed. Reno became Reinhold's front-line ally in the Heartland, while Kliff went to work at Reinhold's headquarters, known as the Citadel. Reno knew the Citadel only from rumor. It was a fortress, spy center and pleasure palace, hidden in a vast underground bunker buried deep in the Rocky Mountains. Its location was known only to the faithful, and it had the capacity to suddenly disappear. Some people said it could be entered only by dreaming. Others said it wasn't real at all. Reno wasn't used to answering to anybody, so before long he grew restless in his new role. The Heartland was a thankless frontier. Holding it together was all risk, no reward, and he began to wonder if the alliance was a mistake. When word of this reached the Citadel, Kliff returned to the Midwest to soothe his nerves. He arrived in a convoy well after midnight, after a mechanical problem delayed him near Great Bend for hours. Reno was there at the station to greet him. They embraced warmly, pounding each other on the back and shoulders, as their breath threatened to freeze and fall crashing at their feet. Reno gestured to the lanterns that lit the grounds. "No electricity now in this part of the state. No fuel to run the generators." They walked to a private car that waited with its engine running, and he shrugged at Kliff's questioning look. "I've managed to hold onto some of the conveniences we're both used to." They got in the back seat together, and rode through dark, icy streets to the rail yards by the river. Along the way, a fire burning on the sidewalk revealed a drawn, bearded face in a pile of blankets. Further on, several drifters milled in and out of a corner house as if preparing for a fight. When they finally pulled up in front of Reno's compound, the riot of sound and light that enveloped them felt out of place, a deliberate slap at the solemn resignation that gripped the rest of the city. Reno guided Kliff up the loading ramp with a hand on his back. Several people stood around outside, drinking and laughing. The women especially wore outfits too skimpy for midwinter, and the men stroked them to keep them warm. A blonde by the door turned from her companion, a sharp dresser with a face like a shovel, to brush her lips against Reno's ear as they squeezed past. Up a flight of stairs at the far end of the building, Reno's windowless office was quiet. He gestured Kliff to a chair and closed the door, removing the heavy black overcoat he'd looted from a men's store downtown, during the days of rioting. He passed Kliff a drink and stood in the middle of the room, staring at him with intelligent pale eyes. Kliff sensed that Reno was balanced precariously between excellence and oblivion, as if about to self-destruct. As a teenager among the stampeding, panic-driven rioters, he'd stood out for his natural grace, the ease of his violence. He had a gift for leadership, but only in desperate times like these. He kept people guessing. They never knew whether he would offer tenderness or pain. Looking at him now, Kliff felt that the cruelty was more dominant than before. "Have you had a rough year?" he asked from his chair. Reno scowled. "Keeping an operation like this is a lot harder than starting one." "You aren't the first person to discover that." "I've had visitors, emissaries from the other side. What I do is too successful now to be our secret. They consider this their territory. They made me an offer." "And...?" The anger was in plain view now. "I said no." Kliff shrugged. "Take it as a compliment. They've started to take you seriously." He downed the brandy and held his glass out for more. "We knew this would happen. Have they moved against you yet?" "Preliminaries. Spies here at the compound, I'm pretty certain. Harassment of my people out on the road. The Sheriffs' League is trying to set up a network to control trade between the cities. They let their people through, but mine get picked off one by one. I could lose my best people that way." "The lines are hardening." "I've kept things open for you east of the Rockies. I've done it almost single-handedly. So far, I haven't asked for a whole lot in return." "Do you want to stand and fight, or do you want to pull back to safer ground?" "Are you offering me the choice?" "We are. Denver? Flagstaff? The further you pull back, the more reliable our support. But I thought you wanted it this way. Out here, it's your own show." "I do want it this way. I just don't want to see my people slaughtered." "Then arm them better. Travel with guard vehicles. Those local sheriffs aren't so well equipped. And stay ahead of your opponents, move into territory they haven't thought of yet. Their operation may be powerful, but it's run from the East Coast. You've got the whole middle of the country to work with. You can be bigger than them, here on your own ground." "Nothing you've said is new." "But you wanted to hear it. We're not going to abandon an old friend. We have spies of our own, you know. Your enemies aren't invulnerable. In fact, you scare them. You're got a chance to box them in for good. But I'll warn you, before they admit they're beat, they'll throw everything they have at you. Take it as a compliment, like I said." He returned to the Citadel, leaving Reno to do what he was good at, defeating and absorbing his rivals. In time, with the help of the Citadel, he achieved his goal, becoming the only independent warlord from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Chicago sought an alliance, and he was strong enough to hold off the wise guys from New York. That should have been something to celebrate, but it put him face to face with an even bigger obstacle, the U.S. Army. He didn't want to pick a fight with the Army, but he felt there was no other way. Whenever he made a deal with one group of commanders, the troops harassing his supply lines turned out to belong to an entirely different chain of command. The Army was slippery that way. They were impossible to deal with honorably. He could have handled them if they were willing to stay bribed, but this maze of shifting alliances made it impossible to protect his men. He didn't want to turn against his protector, but he had no choice. He knew that any rebellion against the Army would be a rebellion against Reinhold. There were generals in Washington giving patriotic speeches, but Reinhold in his mountain fortress called the shots. Meanwhile, the Army abducted young men into their ranks, frisked women at checkpoints, heaped abuse on old people in the town square. Reminding himself that he was the protector of his turf, he threw himself into the role of resistance fighter. His friends at the Salon des Assassins noticed his change of heart, and revealed to him that they had been working to undermine the Army all along. Their resistance network was already in place, and they had joined his truck smuggling ring because it was the perfect way to connect with rebel groups in other cities. Instead of being angry with them for using him in this way, he invited them to work with him directly from then on. He would help them with their most cherished goal, infiltrating and destroying the Citadel. They decided to take the Citadel by surprise, but first they had to learn where it was. If they could attack it without warning and disable its command center, Reinhold would be unable to communicate with his forces in the field. The carefully regulated balance would fall apart, pitting regional commanders against each other. This would give their resistance room to breathe. Without such a knockout blow, their struggle would be over before it began. They could never win a war of attrition against a full-blown army. They formed a secret commando unit and began training. To build confidence, they began with minor raids on Army supply lines. Always a hands-on leader, Reno led these raids himself. Meanwhile his agents mapped the positions of Army forces throughout the region, in an attempt to uncover their lines of communication and trace them back to the source. They identified several Citadel agents and tracked them, but kept losing the trail. It was the Blues Singer who gave them the breakthrough they needed. A newcomer had been frequenting the bathhouses in pursuit of erotic pleasures. But he was asking too many questions, of the sort that make her suspect he was an Army intelligence officer sent to gather information on their movement. Posing as a sex worker herself, she laid a trap for him. Using an intricate blend of seduction and torture, she turned his techniques against him and managed to extract his most precious secret, the location of the Citadel. They decided to move against the Citadel immediately, while they still had the element of surprise. Reno volunteered to lead their forces in a direct assault. They set up a base camp in the hills of southern Utah, overlooking the Citadel. A decoy force would create a diversion in the valley below, while Reno and his band of assassins raided the Citadel compound. Their goal was to infiltrate the command center and destroy it. If possible, they would take out Reinhold himself. Reno hoped that once Kliff realized what was happening, he would join their rebellion from within. He gave the signal and they went into action, but the Blues Singer had betrayed them and they were quickly surrounded. Reinhold had known they were there all along. He was able to break out of the trap with a few of his men, but Reinhold's forces caught up with them in the nearby desert. In the resulting standoff, he shot himself rather than be captured. Maybe his heroism would be sung by future generations, but more likely his story would soon be forgotten. • • • Somewhere, Timmins imagined, Reinhold was laughing. Anton had failed to rally people against him, or damage him in any way. The world was disintegrating, and all the beauty had been sucked out of it as they had known it would. Yet perhaps Anton's real mission had never been to stop the Colonel, but simply to get out of the world while there was still time. In that, he'd succeeded brilliantly. Then why had he insisted that Timmins stay behind to witness the slow-motion catastrophe? What purpose did that serve? Timmins remained in his farmhouse well into old age, despite the worsening conditions around him. He had everything he needed outside his door, a river, a vegetable garden, a few chickens. He amused himself by tending bees. He'd lived for over fifty years in the same place, filling it with mementos and creative clutter. Braving the dangers, a steady stream of pilgrims came from as far away as Japan or Peru to keep him up to date with the world at large. A network of well-placed friends saw to his needs from afar, collectors and gallery owners he'd known throughout his career. His fondest wish was to die quietly at home, but that proved impossible. Life in the rural interior got too dangerous, and his protectors no longer felt they could guarantee his safety. Against his wishes, he was moved St. Louis where conditions were better. They installed him in a comfortable apartment, and provided him with a young assistant to look after his needs. It was a gesture of compassion to a great artist. Feeling defeated and brittle, he watched things fall apart around him with a sense of resignation. "In the streets is the sound of gunfire. In the distance is fire and smoke." He sat by the window in his wheelchair, bundled in a long overcoat. His assistant stood behind him, pale hands resting on the back of the wheelchair. He watched a group of youths chase a bystander off the sidewalk, through a line of parked cars and onto the pavement. When they caught up with him, they clubbed him with metal pipes, knocking him down. They kicked him savagely in the face, stomach and groin. The man rolled over on his back, arms spread, and began bleeding from the mouth. He watched attentively as they crushed his knees, elbows and wrists one by one with blows from the pipes. A vast explosion welled up on the horizon, moving through the air like a river of heat. The floor shivered, windows rattled, something fell from a shelf and shattered. An orange glow silhouetted the buildings. Clouds of thick, oily smoke pushed into the air. "That would be the old refinery," he muttered. "Someone has exploded the old refinery. Now if we want to keep warm this winter, we'll have to break up abandoned buildings and burn the scraps." Nervousness flickered on the glasses of the young assistant. "What can we do?" "Nothing," he cackled. "All my life I've dreamed of this, was hungry for this. Ever since I was young I knew it was coming, but it played with us, took its time. Now there's nothing to do but watch. Our role is simply to be here, to witness the catastrophe. It's a priceless jewel, you know, to be present at the end of the world." He broke off, disturbed by something. "Now that we're here, it's not what I'd hoped. It's not a purifying force at all." "Will we survive?" "You might. Survival comes naturally to the young, after all. But I'm old. I ask for death and it doesn't come. I'm being kept alive for some reason, my senses intact. It's like a punishment. Mistakes made in our youth, roads not taken. Every cause has an effect, an irreversible chain that leads—that leads to this." His voice sank into itself, no longer acknowledging the other's presence. The young man lit a cigarette, and the red tip reflected in his glasses. Outside, the street began to grow dark. The orange glow of the refinery still lit up the horizon. There was a shadowy movement in the window opposite. Below them, a woman in a red dress joined the youths and was laughing with them, loudly and incontinently, as they stripped the clothes and searched the pockets of the man who lay there, dying or already dead. Timmins spoke again. "This phenomenon is being repeated, you know, in a thousand cities all over the world. Just the other day, I was reading about how a mob had broken into the Louvre, taken all the paintings from the walls and torn them apart, stomping them into the ground or making fires out of them to cook potatoes. They were angry that art is considered such a treasure. Those few relics of another age were so precious that they had a whole palace to themselves, when there's millions of people with no shelter and nothing to eat. So they decided to do away with all that and start over. And you know, I don't blame them. But there were some good paintings there, I hear—even if every schoolboy would love to slash the Mona Lisa simply because he's heard so often that it's a masterpiece." He dozed for a while, and then he was alone. The city now was dark and still. He looked around for his assistant, and then he remembered. The young man had abandoned him, gone off on an errand and not returned. Thinking of himself as young people do. Timmins had enough food in the apartment to last a few more days, but what was the point in drawing things out? He hunkered down to wait for death. He was still waiting when two skinheads broke into the apartment. Angry at finding a frail old man in a wheelchair, they taunted him as they went through his things, tossing aside canvasses and clothing and old letters. In the back of a closet they found Anton's briefcase, the one with the tapes for The Last Assassin. The case had lain there, untouched and forgotten, for over fifty years. Seeing it again, Timmins smiled knowingly. He remembered that it contained a bomb. Anton had shown him once how to disarm it, but he never had. "What are you grinning at?" One of the skinheads grabbed him by his shirt, lifting him from his chair, but his partner pulled him away. They attacked the briefcase with a hammer and chisel they'd found among his things. Repeatedly, their blows bounced off the metal skin. Convinced that it contained something valuable, they attacked it with even more vigor. "That's a high-risk object," he warned them. "It'll blow up if you force it open." They laughed and continued their work. The chisel slipped several more times, but finally they got traction. They raised the hammer for the decisive blow. Timmins closed his eyes, and the room was engulfed in flame. The last of his paintings had come true. Only he'd gotten one thing wrong, he thought as he ascended. Maybe it wasn't the end of the world after all. <<< Back Table of Contents