Read Online Revolution by Michael Sutherland - Free Book Online

could see she was
dying to.
    She put her
cup down as though it was from the Ming Dynasty.
    "Tell me
about it," I said.
    "He
called it the Columbus Machine," she said. "At least that’s what my
son said he was drawing."
    "I meant
the neurologist’s findings," I said.
    She sighed,
composed herself, sat up straight on her perch and focused her eyes on
something behind me.
    Suddenly I
could smell brick dust, tritium trickling through lead pipes and burning metal.
I looked over my shoulder. But the only thing that caught my eye was an atrium,
stuffed with dead cacti hanging on the wall. The mirror at the back of it
reflected the window behind her. A fuzzy orange light blending with violet
filled its frame. I snapped my head back around. But there was nothing to see
but sunlight flickering through the leaves of a poison ivy trying to claw its
way into sanctuary over the edge of the sill.
    "The
doctor didn’t know," she said. "No one did. And my son wouldn’t talk
about it too much. Not at all as he grew older. Just those damn drawings. Even
then he would hide them from us."
    "Where
does his problem come into all of this?" I asked.
    "The
doctor, the neurologist, talked to him like you talk to any ten-year-old child,
by humoring him. My son told the doctor that he, the neurologist, was glowing.
That was the first we knew anything about it. ‘A glow,’ my son said. ‘What
color is it?’ the doctor asked. ‘Violet,’ my son said. Didn’t everyone see it?
‘No,’ the doctor said looking at me then at his father. It was as if he was
accusing us of having done something bad to our own son; poisoned or brainwashed
him. It felt as if we were on trial. But my son said that the doctor glowed,
the nurses glowed, his father and I, everyone and everything glowed.
    ""Some
epileptics see a glow before they have a seizure," the doctor told us
later. Some smell things too. My son had mentioned odors that weren’t there,
like burning pine or creosote. But they ruled out epilepsy. We knew that after
they wired up his brain to a machine. He had no abnormal waves."
    I could feel
bad memories crawling under my skin.
    "Are you
sure he wasn’t sleepwalking when he had these funny turns?" I asked.
    "My son
never walked in his sleep in his life," she said as if I’d slapped her in
the face.
    "One
thing that we did notice," she said, "was that he would paint, draw
those things afterwards and, well, you’ve seen the results of that. I loved
him. But my son couldn’t draw a thing to save himself, except after one of his
episodes."
    I stared down
at my cup. There was nothing but dregs left.
    "More
coffee?" she asked standing clutching her own cup between her hands.
    I shook my
head. "No."
    "Do you
know what he was going through?" she asked pouring more coffee for
herself.
    "Yes."
    I stared down
at my cup again. The dregs had turned into a Maltese cross.
    "Are
they the same symptoms as yours?" she asked walking back.
    "Similar,"
I said, "the glows, the sleep thing, the shakes, the light flares, seeing
things that aren’t really there, the rainbow dreams."
    "Someone
was after him," she said sitting down again, poised, cup between her long
fingers and sipping genteelly. Her eyelashes flapped at me over the rim.
    I jerked up
my head.
    "He told
you that?" I asked.
    "He was
convinced there was," she said putting her cup down more carefully than
before, precisely into the dented ring of her saucer.
    The eagle had
landed on a sea of tranquility.
    And I felt
sick at a stranger’s memory.
    #
    I left with
my hat in my hand.
    I locked up,
sailed the waves to Cuxhaven and trained it to Harburg-Hamburg.
    Everyone
spoke English at a push and I felt like the dumb tourist.
    I set myself
up for six days and nights at the son’s last hotel, der Janus. After that it
was uphill all the way down.
    I flicked
through his notebook: the dates, the times, the places he’d been, the bars.
There were lots of them. And that’s all they were--dates, times,