<<< Back Table of Contents 29 Last Painter Timmins put the last strokes on his painting of the suicide. "Well, I guess it's happened." The paint was already dry. • • • In the weeks following the raid on Anton's studio, the mystery of his disappearance was the talk of Portland. The official story was that he'd learned of the raid in advance, set fire to his studio as a diversion, and fled by some unknown route. He was still at large, and was thought to have left Portland. Some of his fans had alternate theories. Either he'd poisoned himself as the police closed in, like in the movie about him, and his body had been consumed in the flames, or 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 claimed he'd died in a shootout while on the run, while others insisted he'd made it to Mexico, where he was living under a new name. A brief story appeared in the Portland Oregonian a few weeks after the raid, but there was nothing in it to make the connection to Anton. STANDOFF ENDS IN DEATH SALT LAKE CITY (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 White Mesa, Utah, about 300 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. Over the next few months, people slowly forgot about Anton as they went on with their lives. Chaos Theory Records settled its court case, with Kliff as the new owner. The success of Jitterkid made the label a major player, since the new band turned out to be bigger than Anton had ever been. It proved that Kliff could recognize talent, and he became one of the best-known promoters on the West Coast. Over the years he became active in local politics, and was even a protest candidate for mayor. Vince, Blake, Cynthia, and Travis revived the Psychic Rangers, going on to record several new albums. Anton's collections of sayings from the House of Mysticism, Dark Blossoms and Why Psychic Hygiene?, showed up 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. As Zombieland changed over the years and became Asian working class, only Vince and Diane's bookshop remained as an eccentric reminder of techno-primitive times. Becky moved in with Timmins, as each sought comfort from the other for Anton's loss. Becky felt guilty that Anton was gone forever, and she wondered if she could have done anything differently. If she'd been more understanding, maybe Anton wouldn't have acted so rashly? Yet she was annoyed with herself for feeling this way. It wasn't her fault that Anton kept getting into trouble. During their time together, Timmins stopped making any new paintings of Anton, so as not to stir her regrets. 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 him for a biochemist she met in grad school, whom she eventually married. Once she was gone, Timmins took up painting Anton again, but without the same urgency as before. In his paintings Anton grew increasingly superherolike, with hard-to-believe powers. He began to feel that Anton must have been a childhood fantasy, an imaginary friend he'd outgrown. It helped him to believe this, because 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 fantasy to move through the world without a trace, and leave nothing behind after his death. If not for Timmins, his friend and betrayer, he would have succeeded. He'd asked Timmins to "stay behind and tell my story," so Timmins did his best. Techno-primitivism had come and gone, and 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 appeared at the dawn of Timmins' career to warn of dark days to come. To tell Anton's story, Timmins first had to promote himself as a painter, something he never would have done otherwise. Becky helped him with this, as did his former psychiatrist, Dr. Dan. As Dr. Dan had predicted when Timmins was still at the mental hospital, the lurid bohemianism of his canvases was appealing 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 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 arrived on the scene at just the right moment, forcing collectors, critics, and established artists to adapt. 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 him a cab for the ride home, 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 John Deere 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?" the kid asked. "I'll give you twenty cents." He crossed the street, keeping a parked car between them. He held two dimes across the hood of the car. "I have Drum," Timmins said. "Drum? Cool, great!" "Can you wait a minute?" He took the pouch from his jacket and set it on the hood of the car. "You're gonna roll me one?" the boy said in anguish. "Please, you gotta accept my twenty cents." "It's no problem." He was already rolling. The kid held the money under his nose. "Okay. If that's what you want." He pocketed the coins. "What kind of tobacco is that?" the boy said. "Just regular tobacco, only you roll it yourself. It's really strong." "Strong? Great! I need some tobacco in my lungs right now." The boy took a sharp breath. He fingered a small plastic protrusion in the modeling of the hood. "Why do they put these things here? I mean, what do they put them here for? Well, I shouldn't say too much." Timmins handed him the cigarette, and studied him for a moment from beneath his cap. The kid was about eighteen, with some growth on his upper lip. He was fresh faced and wiry, and his eyes were a bit wild. Timmins figured he was on drugs. The boy took off across the street without asking for a light. As he retreated, he called out, "Hey, 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. As his reputation grew, Timmins was increasingly judged by standards all his own. He was seen as a seer, both by fellow artists and by everyday fans. 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 in the aftermath 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. 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 strange, but his knack for capturing details as if he'd been there. Over time, it became obvious that some of those details anticipated real events. He tried to keep people from noticing this by painting events 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 controversy among his critics as to why so many of his early paintings were of Anton. Some insisted that Anton was a fictional character, and for this very reason, they said 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 be considered true until proven otherwise. Unless the Anton canvasses could be shown to be an exception, they should be taken as documentary evidence of a rock star's career. This led specialists to seek proofs of Anton's existence, but the argument was never settled. The costumes, band equipment, and nightclub interiors were all true to the era portrayed, and no anomalies could be found. On the other hand, no outside evidence, 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 the owners. Over time, even the paintings themselves grew hard to find. By then, the global situation was spinning out of control, and people's attention was focused on more urgent matters. Timmins' fame rested not on his portrayal of a young rock star, but on his ability to paint disasters that became real. By this stage of his career, Timmins was known internationally 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 had 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. Through all of this, Colonel Reinhold was at work behind the scenes, destabilizing global politics and financial markets, playing with genetic engineering and climate change. He launched Video Control World, an urban surveillance system that used cameras to capture people's every move, so their bad behavior could be flashed onto giant screens for all to see. As a result, cities like New York and Los Angeles 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, and in one city after another, martial law was declared as the only way to assure basic 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. Meanwhile, the Unity Party gained power in cities throughout the Midwest, where it dismantled all local government. Anne Priestly, its chief propagandist, 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 grown to international prominence under its founder, Ethan Frump, in the years following Anton's death. Its guru, Harry Mellow, no longer used Anton's face or voice, but was portrayed instead by young people of all races and creeds. He'd been known to address crowds in a hundred cities at once, each in their own tongue. "Talk to yourself. Talk to Harry Mellow," was a popular slogan. The rise of the Unity Party spread vigilantism and chaos across the Midwest. Public services collapsed, the highway system fell into disrepair, 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. Controlled now by Reinhold, most people saw them as an occupying force. They kept a few roads and factories open for their own convenience, 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. Anton had predicted all this in his little notebook, the one he'd destroyed just before taking his own life. There's been a worldwide collapse. There are too many people on the planet, and panic is rising. There's less energy in our bones. It's getting harder to breathe. Plants and animals are dying. Drinking from a river is no longer possible, because all the rivers have dried up. The water has been stored away in bottles for sale on shelves, and now even the shelves are empty. Soon we'll share our concrete hell with the pigeons, rats, and super-intelligent dogs that survive in it. Maybe one day there will be lasting peace, but not until we get war out of our system one last time. The next war will be one in which children turn on each other for no apparent reason, beating each other to death with crude, homemade weapons, in a violence so intense their parents will be forced into hiding. The grownups are losing control. There's no TV, or if there is, no one bothers to watch it. There's no money and no laws. We stumble along, more out of habit than anything, disconnected from reality. Our routines lack all purpose, except for those who want to believe things are still normal. • • • 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, but the city was emptier now 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 outside 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. Using sprinklers was out of the question, because the city water system hadn't worked in years, and the water they needed was brought in by truck. A large white sedan sat in the driveway, a relic they used only in emergencies due to lack of fuel. His mother, a kindly, plain-looking woman in her early forties, 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 and sped away. She collapsed on the driveway as a bloodstain gathered there. Reno ran to her side, gently touching her face. She was breathing, but unconscious. He took her to the hospital, but they told him the operation she needed was impossible due to lack of supplies. He watched her die in helpless fury. There was nothing now to hold him to the life he'd been leading. He vowed never again to trust in illusions, or to 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 the decaying city. It was a Midwestern city walled in by the old Interstate, which had become their first line of defense. Reinforced with barbed wire and machine-gun nests, nothing moved on it any more except for military vehicles. They guarded the city against marauding bandits, the pirates of the prairie. Inside the perimeter was a fuel depot, where caravans gathered before setting off under escort. There was an open-air market and squatter camp, where scavengers sold things like 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 arrived there, loaded with materials for a young nation. They'd brought coal from the mountains, and grain from the vast plain. Now, deer lived in the ruins. A few decadents and eccentrics hung on there, surrounded by the 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 a 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 hustler there named Kliff, who ran a shooting gallery and proudly sold his body to the highest bidder. Together they frequented the Salon des Assassins, a club run by the Blues Singer. It was a gathering place for smugglers and subversives. It had a small stage and a piano, and a barman with a bulging forehead and a sharp goatee. The old-timers called him Comrade Lenin after a famous Russian revolutionary. In the back room, the talk was of gun running, drug trafficking, and the porn trade. Reno was drawn to these toughs because he felt he could learn from them, but to his surprise, he soon surpassed them in ruthlessness. They listened to him because he was the one with the ideas. He helped them to spark city-wide riots that went on for weeks, in which he distinguished himself with a highly profitable looting scheme. Building on this success, he set up a truck smuggling ring to ship porn and stolen goods across the Midwest. They returned with manufactured items from the army-run factory towns, things like 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 Army was spread too thin, and it was harried by defections. Most of the soldiers were addicts, demoralized and suspicious of those on the outside. Command lines were unclear, and sometimes the troops went on a rampage, burning crops, smashing homes, 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 Reno threw parties at his compound, loading the tables with food and gifts. He gave out toys to children, and turkeys for Christmas. He helped a poor widow to set up a generator, and gave her a year's supply of fuel. He was on his way to becoming an independent warlord with his own private domain. Kliff watched his friend's rise and cultivated it, urging him to strengthen his position by forming alliances with others more powerful. One day Kliff vanished, returning 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 by rumor. It was a high-tech fortress, a spy center and pleasure palace, hidden in a vast underground bunker 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 doubted it existed at all. Reno wasn't used to coordinating with anyone, and 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 soothe his friend's nerves. He arrived in a military convoy well after midnight, after a mechanical problem had delayed him on the road for hours. Reno was there at the depot 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 gas 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 grinned 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 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, laughing and drinking. 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, long ago in 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 poised 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 his cruelty was more dominant than before. "Have you had a rough year?" he asked from his chair. Reno scowled. "Keeping an operation like this going 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 remain our secret. They want this territory for their own. They made me an offer." "And...?" Reno's anger was in plain view now. "I said no." Kliff shrugged. "Take it as a compliment. They're starting to take you seriously." He downed his brandy and held out his glass for more. "We knew this would happen. Have they moved against you yet?" "Preliminaries. Spies here at the compound. Harassment of my people on the road. The Sheriffs' League is trying to set up a network to control trade between the cities. They let their own 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? Salt Lake? The further you pull back, the more reliable our support. But I thought you liked it this way. Out here, it's your own show." "I do like it this way. I just don't want to see my people slaughtered." "Then arm them better. Use a heavier guard. 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've 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." Kliff returned to the Citadel, leaving Reno to do what he was best at, defeating and absorbing his rivals. In time, with support from the Citadel, he became the only independent warlord from the Rockies to the Mississippi. Chicago sought an alliance, and he was strong enough to hold off the big boys 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 there was no other way. Whenever he made a deal with one group of officers, 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 their maze of shifting alliances made it impossible to protect his men. He knew that a 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. He didn't want to turn against his protector, but he felt he had no choice. The Army abducted young men into its ranks, frisked women at checkpoints, heaped abuse on old people in the town squares. 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'd been working to undermine the Army all along. They belonged to a clandestine resistance network, and they'd joined his truck smuggling ring because it was the perfect cover for connecting 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 openly 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 agents in the field. His carefully regulated balance of forces would fall apart, pitting regional commanders against each other. This would give the 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 Citadel. They identified several of Reinhold's 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 city's bathhouses in pursuit of erotic pleasures. He was asking too many questions, and she'd come to suspect he was a spy, an Army intelligence officer sent to gather information on their movement. Posing as a sex worker, she laid a trap for him. Using an exquisite 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 high in the Utah mountains, overlooking the Citadel. A decoy force would create a diversion in the valley below, while Reno and his band of assassins raided the compound. Their goal was to infiltrate the Citadel's command center and destroy it. If possible, they would eliminate 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 soon surrounded. Reinhold had known they were there all along. Reno 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, Reno shot himself rather than be captured, feeling like the victim of a prank of fate. • • • Somewhere, Timmins imagined, Reinhold was laughing. Anton had failed to rally the public against him, or harm the Citadel in any way. The world was disintegrating just as they'd known it would, all its beauty sucked out. Yet perhaps Anton's real goal had never been to stop the Colonel, but simply to leave the world while there was time. In that, he'd succeeded brilliantly. If that was the case, why had he insisted that Timmins stay behind to witness the slow-motion catastrophe? What purpose did that serve? He wondered if Anton might be planning to return to the world in another form. Maybe it was his job to wait for a second Anton? They would recognize each other immediately as they had before, and he was ready to help the new Anton when he appeared. For as long as he cherished this hope, he remained on the lookout, but it never happened. Apparently Anton had finished his mission and would never be back. Despite the worsening conditions around him, he stayed in his farmhouse well into old age. He had everything he needed outside his door: fresh water, a vegetable garden, a few goats and chickens. Braving the dangers, a steady stream of admirers came from as far away as Bolivia or Japan to keep him up to date on 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. 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 as he spoke with a visitor. He had a blanket on his lap, and 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," he said. "Other people knew him, too, but not like me, I don't think, not like me. We had an understanding 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 would 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 Hawaiian shirt in a summer garden, smiling into the sun. In this photo, Anton was about twenty-one. He took it in his frail hands. It was the day 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 me, 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. Who am I to argue? I only wish he could have been born into 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 my memories, of course, and even evidence. But after all these years, I can't say any more how much 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 a way, Anton died to make me who 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 visitor 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," he said. "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 and grain of wood at Ruby's Place—it was there for a reason, it was meant to be understood. Naturally, that got to be distracting after a while, and 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. • • • After living in the same house for over fifty years, surrounded by mementos and creative clutter, Timmins' fondest wish was to die there as well, quietly and from old age. But life in the rural interior grew too dangerous, and his protectors no longer felt they could guarantee his safety. Against his wishes, they moved him to Baltimore where conditions were better. They installed him in a spacious apartment with all his possessions, and provided him with a young assistant to look after his needs. Defeated and brittle, he watched things fall apart around him with an air of resignation. "In the streets is the sound of gunfire," he said softly. "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 chair. In the street below, a group of youths chased 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 pipes, knocking him down. They kicked him savagely in the face, stomach, and groin. The man rolled onto his back, arms spread, and began bleeding from the mouth. Timmins leaned forward to watch as the youths smashed 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," Timmins muttered. "Someone has exploded the old refinery. Now, if we want to keep warm this winter, we'll have to break apart 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 treasure, you know, to be present at the end of the world." He broke off, disturbed by something. "Only, now that we're here, it's not what I'd hoped. It's not a purifying force at all." "Will we survive?" said the young man. "You might. Survival comes naturally to the young, after all. But I'm old. I long for death and it doesn't come. I've been 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, its red tip reflected in his glasses. Outside, the street began to grow dark. The orange glow of the refinery lit 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. They took all the paintings from the walls and tore 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 relics of another age were so precious that they had a whole palace to themselves, though millions of people have no shelter and nothing to eat. So they decided to do away with all that, and start over. And you know, I can't blame them at all. But there were some good paintings there, I hear." He took a moment to mourn them. "Even if any schoolboy would love to slash the Mona Lisa, simply because he's heard so often it's a masterpiece." He dozed for a while, and when he woke, he was alone. The city now was dark and still. He looked around for his assistant, then he remembered. The young man had gone off on an errand and not returned. He still had enough food to last for a few days, but what would he do after that? He could no longer go outside to his garden, his chickens. No matter. He was old and tired, and impatient for death. He hunkered down to wait. He was still waiting two days later, when a pair of skinheads broke into the apartment. Angry at finding nothing but a frail old man in a wheelchair, they taunted him as they tossed his canvasses, clothing, and papers around the room. "I bet you don't like having us here," one of them said, "smashing your shit. But there ain't much you can do about it, is there?" "I never seen so much junk in my life," said the other. "Where's the booty, man? Tell us and we'll leave you alone." After a while they found Anton's briefcase, the one with the tapes to The Last Assassin, in the back of a dark closet. It had lain there for fifty years, untouched and forgotten. Seeing it again, Timmins smiled knowingly, remembering that it contained a bomb. "What are you grinning at?" one of the punks said, grabbing him by the shirt and lifting him halfway from the wheelchair. His partner pulled him away. They set to work on the case, but were unable to get it open, so they assumed it contained something valuable. They attacked it with a mallet and chisel they found among his things. Their blows bounced repeatedly off the metal skin, which only made them angrier. "That thing will blow up if you force it open," he said calmly. "It's a high-risk object." They laughed and continued their work. The chisel slipped several more times, but finally they got traction. One of them lifted the mallet for the decisive blow. Timmins closed his eyes as they were engulfed in a sheet of flame. The last of his paintings had come true, the one depicting his death. Only, maybe he'd exaggerated, he thought as he ascended. Maybe it wasn't the end of the world after all. <<< Back Table of Contents