The day of the test approached quickly with the waning of fall into the chills of winter. The Department of Defense spared no expense on my test suit, perhaps they did not want me to be exposed to the dangers of the age, the industrial pollutants, or whatever I would encounter in that dead and forlorn time. The test suit was a ridiculous combination of spandex, gore tex, flame retardant fabric, Kevlar interwoven bullet and knife protection, and insect repellent. One could never be too sure that the bugs of the day did not carry diseases that would cause immediate mission failure and waste the taxpayer’s dollars. Every element was planned for except the all too familiar creature of stark human greed. The brass had left their cynicism when they were promoted out of middle management apparently. Since, taking on the mission, I trained like an astronaut. I was dunked in a tank of cold water to improve my ability to survive drowning and learn to hold my breath for extended periods of time. Still, they could not beat the seed of greed that Eggers planted in my mind, and it grew into a noxious weed. By the time it came for me to go back, I was already thinking about what I would spend my money on when I returned. Whatever idealistic notions I previously harbored were soon replaced by visions of fancy cars and fancier women. I shoved the diamonds into my jail wallet, already thinking about cruising around in a bright red Ferrari, that is, after I founded an institute for underprivileged inner city children, to teach them the wonders of science and all that nonsense.
I came from the toilet and smiled to Eggers that the deed was done. He pulled me in close, grasping the conspicuously blank epaulets of my shoulders in a mock embrace.
“Please don’t fail,” he said.
“I’ll try not to.”
“Put an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune when you buy the shares. Make it for a lost dog named, uh, named…”
“Einstein. A Grey Haired Rambunctious Terrier,” I said, filling in his thought pattern.
“Good. I’ll be on the lookout for it.”
A technician told me that it was time for my journey. I waved to the brass and posed for a photograph that would never be released to the public. The technician strapped me into the machine and the glass closed around me without so much as a sound. Inside, there was perfect silence. The machine started, the whirring grew in intensity. The faces of the onlookers melted into a sea of white. I breathed.
I dropped approximately five feet and landed hard into the dust in the back storage room of the Macy’s Department Store, just as we had planned. A wave of pain shot through my body and I struggled to breathe. My first thoughts were on the precious cargo. When I caught my breath I reached upwards and pulled the bag out of my ass. I gripped it tightly in my pocket. Flashes like lighting ripped through the air above me. Three objects hit the floor around me, a child’s ball, a book, and t-shirt. This, the evidence that I had been back in time. I photographed them with the small device I was given, disguised to look like a key chain. A glowing ball hovered in the air. All I had to do was touch it and go back. I couldn’t. Not yet. Theoretically, I could stay for a year or two and they wouldn’t know the difference.
I opened the door and the hallway was eerie, dimly lit, it smelled of the past. I passed a door marked BATHROOM. I entered it and fumbled with the ancient toilet, after I relieved myself. The brass fixtures are sweating. I hear a noise in the hallway. I freeze. The person behind the door jiggles the handle twice and grumbles. It sounds like an old man, he smells like whiskey abuse dashed with a side of old cigar. I imagine him with a white brushy bill moustache. The shadows depart underneath the door, I wait for the footsteps to fade. I opened the door into the white and fluorescent hallway, flickering lights and the smell of mothballs, pungent in the stale hallway. I finger the diamonds in their bag, feeling them rub over one another, glistening. I walk the length of the hallway. As I leave the hallway and the greater mall greets me and I see the people, most of them dead in my present time, I laugh. I feel like a thief of memory. I stop by a fountain that a small child is pitching pennies into. A woman stands there, and pulls the plait in her hair. I ask her the time.
“10:32 in the morning,” she says.
“Sorry, I’ve been traveling. What’s the date?”
“You’re asking me on a date?”
“No. What’s the date?”
I saw the source of her misunderstanding. Two large plastic hearing aids covered the entrance to her ear canals.
“December 26, 1987,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said with a smile. I was not being polite. I smiled because my theory was correct. Now, it was time to make some money. The Nobel Prize for Physics was worth three million dollars at the most. Eggers was talking hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Where’d you get your track suit at? Footlocker?” the young lady asked.
“Yeah, its on sale.”
***
B. Mescherman’s was only a short cab ride away. Since I had no cash yet, I had to walk. I had to dart across traffic and narrowly avoided getting hit by a semi-truck. He honked his horn and shouted something unintelligible at me. I crossed the campus of a large high school, and the marching band practiced in the snow, some cheerleaders looked up at me from their routines. The look on their faces was surprise and I detected perhaps attraction on the face of one, her hair was black and wavy, she looked Italian. I did not smile back at her. The sun was setting, B. Mescherman’s would close soon. I remembered the briefing that that the dip in uniform gave to me, warning me about all the dangers of the age. I recalled that today was near the day that a madman shot up McDonald’s and carried his massacre over to a local strip club. I walked past a Donut Prince store, and past a Carpet Warehouse before finally reaching B. Mescherman’s parking lot. Old Man Mescherman’s Mercedes Benz, with its vanity plate 5CARAT5 was parked in the owner’s space. What a vain old bastard, I thought as I tried to open the door. It would not budge. I saw Old Mescherman inside, he looked at me crossly as if to tell me to go away. I put a few of the bigger rocks in my hand and held them up to the light. I think he saw the glinting in my palm because he buzzed me into a security alcove, which was a brace against the wind, but by no means heated.
He approached me cautiously, like a wayward bird, attracted to the shiny rocks, his head cocked slightly downward, forced by the gem’s gravity.
“Are they real?” he asked.
“You’ll have to be the judge of that.”
“Come back tomorrow,” the Old Man said.
“I’ll go somewhere else,” I threatened.
I held up the biggest bastard, glinting like the knife edge of the sun.
“That real?” he inquired again.
“Of course! Would I run all the way across Chicago and catch pneumonia to try and pass off some fake diamonds to an expert such as yourself?”
He buzzed me into the store from the security alcove.
“You cold?” he asked laughing.
“Just above freezing, but money makes me warm,” I said.
“I’m not going to ask where you got these,” Mescherman said.
“They’re for sale,” I announced.
“Of course,” he returned. He started looking at them, the way all of the gemologists do.
“I’ll need to map these and run them by DeBeers just to see that they aren’t stolen,” Mescherman said.
“They aren’t stolen,” I returned.
“I have to be sure. We can’t be selling diamonds in this shop that are stolen. Not that I’m saying you are, but we can’t be selling diamonds robbed from graves here. That happened, you know. Guy got closed down in Pittsburgh for that.”
“They’re not,” I said confidently. I then thought, you know, Eggers is capable of anything.
“Well, at any rate, I don’t need the chips. You can pawn those things for some walking around money, till I get these confirmed by DeBeers.”
“How long does that take?”
“Up to a week.”
“How much do you think I’ll get?”
He carefully weighed the diamonds on the scale. The scale read 14.7 carats and oscillated between 14.6 and 14.7.
“Good clarity, excellent, cut…”
“Okay.”
“If these check out, I can cut you a check for oh, thirty-five thousand.”
“Forty thousand,” I said.
“You’re nuts.”
“You’re getting a bargain. Make it forty thousand or I take them to a less reputable dealer tonight.”
His face dropped with the gravity of my insult.
“I’ll stay here tonight and map these beauties for you, that’s the most I can do.”
I agreed. Still I had no money. He signed a voucher for me to prove that I had dropped the diamonds off to his care. That way if he stole them, I would have recourse to someone, somewhere, to recover them.
“Where can I pawn these diamond chips?”
“Take them to my friend Murray at Golden Lion Pawn, its about five blocks away on your right. Tell them Bernie sent you over.”
I thanked him and departed. I walked through the parking lot, snow fell, making it difficult to see in front of my face. The Golden Lion was a ratty looking yellow building with a glowing red pawn symbol in neon blinking in the window. Inside the pawn shop, which smelled of Italian food and dust, musical instruments, some brassy and shining and some looked as if they survived a warehouse fire, dented and unable to reflect the other huge sign advertising GUNS, JEWELRY, and GOLD. The pawnbroker was a boring looking woman whose face seemed unable to bear the weight of the world on her. She wore a moo moo, purple and yellow in color.
“Help ya?”
“Do you buy raw diamonds? Bernie said you do.”
“Depends what you got for me.”
“Diamond chips.” I said holding my hand with the baggie out to her.
“Hold it there,” she wheezed. ”Don’t come no closer, I don’t know you from Adam.”
“This how you treat all your customers?”
“Yes. Till they prove themselves to be loyal customers and not nutties. Plenty of nutties around here.”
“I’m no Raskolnikov,” I said smiling.
“Who?” she asked.
“Nevermind, just call Bernie. He’ll vouch for me.”
“Ehh…don’t feel like talkin’ to that busybody. You look trustworthy enough.”
She looked over my diamond chips with a lens. Bernie’s lens looked more genuine.
I watched her wheeze as she lifted the small gram weights into place.
“One fifty,” she announced.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, take it or leave it, you didn’t bring me the Star of Africa.”
“I’ll take it.”
She drew up a receipt and smashed the greasy bills into my palm. I thanked her and walked out into the cold. She went back to eating her lasagna. This money wouldn’t go towards penny stocks. It would go to getting me a place to stay for the evening. The lights blazed across the highway. Holiday Inn. This old sign would not fit well into the streamlined plastic future. It was genuine 1980s pomposity. The hair of the front desk clerk was worse. The dawn of punk rock obviously influenced his stylings.
“Smoking or non-smoking?” he asked sarcastically.
“Non-smoking.”
“Too bad man, I got some killer herb.”
“No thanks.”
“All we get are cop types here, man.”
“I’m not a cop, I just want to be able to think on my own.”
“You should give what I’ve got a try.”
“No way.”
“Don’t tell on me then,” he implored me.
“Don’t worry.”
I walked down the dim hallway to my room. The place was not the least bit inviting. I opened the door with my key and walked inside. Through force of habit, I checked the room by sweeping my hand over all the overhanging edges, for listening devices. I think I saw that in a movie once. Sleep came to me quickly.
That evening, a knock at my door alarmed me. I jumped up from bed and without putting all my clothing on, answered the door. It was the punker front desk clerk.
“Hey man? You in trouble?” he asked with wild eyes.
“No.”
“Some pigs were here looking for you, bro.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Some pigs, man. The police. Don’t worry though, I played real cool and told them I had no idea who you were. He showed me a photograph of you though.”
“Who were they? Police?”
“Yeah, some old cop and two young cops. They were really beefy, like Arnold.”
“Who?”
“Schwarzenegger. You know Conan the Barbarian.”
“Oh. They leave their names?”
“No. Just letting you know man.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah. Fuck the Police bro. NWA Forever.”
“Huh?”
“I got your back.”
“Okay.”
I shut the door on him. I couldn’t sleep anymore. The news had me reeling. How would the police know about me already. I left immediately. I put on my jumpsuit and walked out the back door, so that whoever was looking for me would not find me. I had to hide somewhere. I saw an answer in the frosty wasteland, a bar, well rather a strip club. The PUSSY CAT club. I trudged in the distance towards it. I recall driving past it as a child, when it was already abandoned. Aunt Frida hated the place. She wouldn’t tell me why. She only told me that a madman shot the place up after first shooting up the McDonald’s across the street. I don’t know why I wanted to go there. Call it youthful curiousity.
The Man With Bright Green Eyes is Copyright 2011, Hard Oak Press and Jeffrey M. Hopkins, All Rights Reserved.
