Dying to be Free Read online

  DYING TO BE FREE

  Danny stared thirty-four flights below at lights streaming red through the night.

  When he looked up at the night sky the stars glittered back like silver-white pinpoints.

  Home is out there somewhere. He thought. A place I’ll never see.

  He touched the glass to remind him of what that place must have been like; its arctic snows and endless nights, a place where he would have walked through magnetic curtains of blue and green.

  Mere reminders, visions of the real thing, false memories implanted at the molecular level.

  When he took his hand away from the glass the memories faded and the blackened windows of the skyscrapers in the distance returned.

  He would have given anything to stand on those icy slopes of home, to feel the trickle of thawing mineral water on his hands, his face, into his open eyes.

  He had been there many times in his dreams that it almost felt real; the memories of a young man coming of age, a solitary explorer memorizing his surroundings, the landscape, the rocks, the ice, and the crevasses as he clambered over frozen slopes to stand alone and look upon a sun on a midnight-blue horizon, a sun that would soon turn orange then red…

  Jimmy twisted around in the dark in the old armchair behind him.

  “You’re thinking,” Jimmy said.

  “What about?” Danny asked following the navigation lights of an airliner high above the Hudson.

  “Blue and green,” Jimmy said. “I can see it.”

  “Very perceptive,” Danny said.

  Jimmy leaned forward.

  “You don’t happen to have any smokes, do you?” he asked.

  Danny reached into his pocket, took out a tin, and without looking, threw it over his shoulder to Jimmy.

  “Nice one,” Jimmy said snatching the tin from the air.

  “You haven’t been on the old dope-fiend merry-go-round again, have you?” he asked.

  “No,” Danny said, “but I am running low on Methylphenidate.”

  Jimmy sniffed.

  “I hate this reality shit,” he said popping the lid on the tin.

  Danny sighed and put his hands into his pockets of his long coat.

  “And which one would that be?” he asked staring out at the black sky.

  “This place,” Jimmy said settling back, “any place in this dimension, whatever you call it. It’s nicer there, the other place.”

  Danny didn’t have the heart to tell Jimmy that the other place he was talking about no longer existed, that it hadn’t for two billion years, that it was just about time for the light of its destruction to reach the earth - a supernova that would flash in the constellation of Lyra, and be over in a few seconds.

  “We don’t even know if that place is real, Jimmy,” he said.

  He looked over his shoulder as Jimmy struck a match and lit his cigarette.

  He turned back to the window again as the phosphoric odor from Jimmy’s spent match drifted through the air to.

  It began to snow.

  “What time is it?” he asked watching the snowflakes drifting down.

  Jimmy plucked the cigarette from his mouth and looked at its glowing end.

  “October fifteenth, 1964,” he said taping ash onto the floor.

  “The real time,” Danny said.

  “That is the real time,” Jimmy said.

  “Relative time then,” Danny said exasperated.

  Jimmy sighed and dragged his sleeve up his arm and looked through the cracked glass of the wristwatch he’d found on fifty-third and third.

  “It’s just after seven thirty,” he said. “What difference does it make? It’s always morning or night when we’re around these days.”

  “Dark,” Danny said.

  Jimmy sniffed, took a long drag on his cigarette and wriggled down further in the battered old armchair.

  “I’m beginning to feel like a vampire,” he said.

  “And where are you going to find one, Jimmy?” Danny asked in a low from the window.

  “Ha ha. In my dreams,” Jimmy said “But you know what? Vampires might really be friendly guys, just like us.”

  “Vampires don’t exist,” Danny said.

  “But unfortunately we do,” Jimmy said.

  Danny closed his eyes. He hated hearing Jimmy sounding so down. He opened his eyes again and stared out at the endless skyscrapers.

  “Come on, Jimmy,” he said.

  “All I’m saying,” Jimmy said, “is that I just wished we lived in the light again, that we could walk down the streets without being scared of every shadow.”

  The old coat he’d hooked out of the trash two nights ago was too big and looked like it was about to swallow him.

  Danny stepped back from the window when a candle-like glow flickered in one of the windows opposite.

  His eyes glittered.

  “We’re both scared, Jimmy,” he said, “Everyone’s scared in this city. That’s why we’re looking out for each other.”

  Jimmy reached out and rested his hands on the arms of the old armchair.

  Danny twisted around and looked over his shoulder at him.

  He laughed.

  “And from where I’m standing,” he said, “you look like one great big treacle jelly.”

  Jimmy squirmed and grimaced around the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “I don’t like being looked upon as something you can eat,” he said.

  Danny walked across the floor, his boots hammering on the bare floorboards.

  “What a place to pick for meeting, huh?” Jimmy said wriggling deeper into the cushions.

  “It’s as good as any,” Danny said. “It’s nice and quiet, and it’s abandoned.”

  “Too damn creepy and isolated if you ask me,” Jimmy said. “We’re practically on the moon up here.”

  He sniffed the air.

  “And it stinks,” he said.

  “What do you suppose we do?” Danny said. “Go out and yell everything at the top of our lungs.”

  “Now there’s an idea,” Jimmy said plucking the cigarette from his mouth.

  “One,” Danny said turning to the window again, “no one would believe us. Two - they would think we were nuts anyway. And I’m not so sure they would be wrong given our circumstances…”

  “Affliction I’d say,” Jimmy sniffed.

  … and three,” Danny went on, “no one wants to get involved if there’s a hint of trouble, the worst kind of trouble, trouble they don’t understand, trouble like us. We are, as they say on our own.”

  Neither said anything for a second.

  No one moved until Jimmy broke the silence.

  “They’re after us again,” he said blowing smoke into the air. “You know that don’t you?”

  “They’re always after us, Jimmy,” Danny said. “So what’s new?”

  “They’re close this time,” Jimmy said. “That’s what’s new. I mean, who are they anyway? We don’t see them but we know they’re there. Who are they? What are they? Government? CIA…

  “The CIA doesn’t work inside the country, Jimmy,” Danny said.

  “FB fucking I then, Danny,” Jimmy snapped. “It doesn’t make any difference who they are; scientists, military, whatever the fuck they are. And what do they want with us anyway? Why don’t they just give up? Shit, why did I have to be born this way?”

  “You remember being born?” Danny asked looking over his shoulder again but this time looking down at the floor then up at the black mass that was Jimmy slumped back in his too big coat.

  Now it was Jimmy’s turn to laugh. “No!”

  “Then how’d you know you were?” Danny asked.

  Jimmy inhaled deep on his cigarette and sighed as he blew more smoke int
o the dark

  “I just wish we lived in the light again, Danny, that’s all I’m saying,” he said in a conciliatory tone.

  “And miracles might happen,” Danny said.

  “Of course,” Jimmy said with a shrug, “we could try a little self-delusion and pretend like everything is all right, that no one notices. I mean, what is to notice about us?”

  “Stop it, Jimmy,” Danny said.

  “Maybe we should try Luudes or something,” Jimmy said as he sank deeper into the cushions.

  “Yeah, Jimmy,” Danny said, “that’s the way to go. Let’s really brain ourselves on goofballs and Christ knows what else. Like you really want to be caught?”

  “I dunno,” Jimmy said. “It’s just each day, each night, seems to get harder and harder to crawl through.”

  “I know,” Danny said.

  “I’m just tired, Danny. I’m tired of running and hiding and always watching my back. I’m tired of being scared. I’m scared to fall asleep because I think that they’re gonna get me when I least expect it. I’m scared of being alone.”

  “Hey, come on,” Danny said. “Do you think I’d let them get to you?”

  “I hate this place,” Jimmy said. “I hate the reality of this place. I hate the gutters. I hate needing to sneak around backstreets. And I hate that everyone’s always fighting or being drunk. This is not a great place to be living in, Danny. All I know is that it’s a lot nicer over the other side when I’m there, wherever that is.

  “Still, we’re stuck with here for as long as it lasts. Have to make do with that shit fact for as long as we’re here. Man, if I could find myself a rocket I’d jump in the damn thing and light the blue touch paper myself.”

  Danny watched the candle-like light flicker and die in the window of the skyscraper opposite.

  “Are you finished?” he asked.

  “No,” Jimmy said. “Sometimes I just wish I could fall asleep and go over to the other side, like we do, only this time permanently so that we never have to come back.”

  He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with the heel of his boot.

  “You don’t mean that, Jimmy,” Danny said.

  “It can’t be worse than this,” Danny said flopping back.

  “You’ve been reading too much Timothy Leary again,” Danny warned.

  “Don’t mock., “ Jimmy said nodding “That guy has some good things to say.”.

  “I don’t remember Leary saying anything about trying to return to a dead body,” Danny said. “I would think that would kinda puts the blockers on the slipstream of return. Anyway, stop your whining. That other place might not be as nice as here.”

  “This is nice?” Jimmy asked raising his arms in the dark.

  “It could be worse,” Danny said.

  “It could be better,” Jimmy said. “I’m sick of always being on the run.”

  Danny shook his head.

  “They won’t leave us alone for as long as they want us for what we are,” he said. “We just to put up with it. All we need to do is keep one step ahead, keep on our guard, keep looking out for each other.”

  “What I don’t get is what good we are to them,” Jimmy said.

  “Well," Danny said, “it’s not every day you find yourself a couple of real live walkie-talkie bi-locating boys now, is it?”

  He stepped back over to the window, his boots crunching on fallen plaster.

  “Maybe,” Jimmy said, “it’s because they want us as part of some kind of secret collection or something. Like having us would be like capturing a couple of very rare butterflies. Anyway, we don’t bi-locate.”

  “We do,” Danny said pulling himself up straight. “In a sense we do, when you think about it.”

  “It’s completely different,” Jimmy said. “We glide through invisible doorways. We can’t even control it, and I for one, can never remember anything when I get back from wherever the hell those places are. If they are real, that is. So what good would we be to anyone anyway? And another thing, we don’t jump from place to place on this plane. Not much anyway if I can help it. No point in jumping from one pile of shit into another, is there?”

  “Doors they can’t find never mind walk through,” Danny said. “I think that would be pretty neat for them to have, guys like us, coveted toys that no one else has. Anyway you’re forgetting something. We don’t glide through those doorways, we are the doorways. There’s a big difference.”

  Jimmy raised his hands from where he was still sitting in the armchair and splayed his fingers in the air. Streamers of purple sailed out the ends of his fingertip and hit Danny in the back until Danny radiated with the same iridescence.

  “Hey look at that,” Jimmy said. “You know what this means, don’t yah?”

  Danny looked over his shoulder.

  “What?”

  “We could be twins,” Jimmy said.

  “No we’re not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Different mothers, different fathers,” Danny said.

  “What mothers? What fathers?”

  “You’re splitting hairs,” Danny said.

  “I don’t think we have any brothers or sisters either,” Jimmy said.

  Danny turned around, raised his hand and pulled the lights away, holding them at arm’s length.

  “Quit it will you?” he said.

  “Doesn’t be such a spoilsport,” Jimmy said.

  He dropped his arms and the light faded.

  “It’s not like anyone can see us up here for crying out loud. We’re that high we’re practically on Mars.”

  “It was the moon a minute ago,” Danny said.

  He looked out at the skyscrapers.

  “If we can see them,” he said, “then maybe someone out there can see them too.”

  “How’d they find out about us anyway?” Jimmy asked.

  “Trinity?” Danny said.

  Jimmy snapped his head up.

  “Not that again,” he said.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have said anything about it,” Danny said.

  “Trinity was twenty years ago,” Jimmy said.

  He sighed and pushed himself out of the armchair.

  Danny shook his head.

  “You shouldn’t have blabbed, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy kicked a lump of plaster across the floor.

  “I didn’t even know what it fucking meant myself,” he said.

  He lit another cigarette and sucked at it hard.

  “But someone did,” Danny said.

  “It was just a word, Danny,” Jimmy said. “One word. They must use it in church every other night of the week.”

  “It was a government secret,” Danny said. “The biggest bomb ever made.”

  “They’d already used the damn thing,” Jimmy said. “What’s secret about it?”

  “What they were working on at the same time maybe?” Danny said.

  “It would never have worked anyway,” Jimmy said.

  “You mean you made sure it wouldn’t work,” Danny said. “You even laughed when you told that guy in the bar what you’d done.”

  “It was a war machine, Danny.”

  “You didn’t just go to the Trinity site, Jimmy. You went back in time and screwed it up. And guess what? Now they want it back. They want it back and they want it to work this time. But you destroyed their plans. You tore them up. You pulled the wires on the damn thing. But they’re working blind. And have nothing to go on except what’s inside your head. They’re working with a scrambled jigsaw and all the missing pieces, all the details, every last one of them, are stuck right inside there,” Danny said taping Jimmy’s forehead.

  Jimmy jerked away.

  “It would have cost millions of lives,” he snapped. “Look at what their fucking bomb did.”

  “Then why the hell did you have to go and blab to some guy in a bar about it? We can’t interfere, Jimmy. We have to learn to keep our heads down and leave things alone, especially stuff that ha
s nothing to do with us.”

  “I get the message, Danny. You’ve told me a million times already.”

  Danny looked at the black strip of the Hudson river, the red and green lights of the cargo ships drifting by.

  “The guy you talked to in the bar called the Long John Nebel Show,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  “Nebel's always talking about kooky stuff,” Danny shrugged. “Flying saucers, you name it. Nobody believes what they hear on that show.”

  “Well someone must have,” Danny said. “Because you said names that no one outside of the project knew about. The names were repeated, and the project name, on air. Why the hell do you think they started looking for us? It doesn’t take a brainiac to work that one out.”

  “I saw the dead people, Danny,” Jimmy said, “millions of them.”

  Danny turned to him.

  “It’s got nothing to do with us about what’s going to happen in the future, Jimmy.”

  “Well it won’t happen now,” Jimmy said. “Not after I fixed it.”

  “So now they’re probably trying to build something even worse,” Danny said.

  “Don’t you care, Danny?”

  “Put it this way, Jimmy. If they do find us and kill us, because that is sure as Christ what they want to do to us, then there won’t be anyone alive left to tell the tale when it needs to be told. We’ll be just another couple of nameless vagrants found dead on the streets to be picked up with the usual trash. And what we have is far too important to let be destroyed.”

  Jimmy pulled himself up straight.

  “Like what?” Jimmy asked. “What do we have that’s so important? You keep saying it but you won’t tell me what it is.”

  Blue and green, and ice flows under star light, and a civilization unable to prevent it’s coming end and you and me, Jimmy, are the only ones holding onto their memory like a picture we no longer have.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Danny said.

  “There you go again,” Jimmy said arms flying then flapping down.

  “What started this off, anyway,” he asked, “withdrawal from not getting enough of your usual junk?”

  Danny turned on him.

  “Don’t start, Jimmy. The only reason I take that stuff is to stop them finding us. At least I’m not the one that goes around firing light beams from my fingertips to blow up the nearest streetlight for fun.”