The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (51 page)

“
This your buddy, Parker?”

“
He ain’t my fucking buddy. I don’t have scumbags for buddies. Present company excluded. Anyway, what about him?”

“
Somebody put the snatch on him. A local wide boy by the name of Alphonso Nightingale. Word has it this cat is the worst kind of news. Some kind of French mafia deal.”

“
So what does this have to do with me?”

“
We just thought you might like to know. Or, you might know something that you might like to tell us.”

“
Actually, there are a couple of things.”

“
Oh yeah?”

“
Yeah. Fuck, and you. I’m on vacation. And you’re out of your jurisdiction and out of your fucking country and if you’re not out of here in five seconds, I’m going to kick the fuck out of you in front of God and all the world. Next question.”

Agent White put her hand on Baby Joe’s shoulder. “Okay, Baby Joe. Okay. We’re sorry if we bothered you. Enjoy your vacation. C’mon, Black, leave the man be.”

“
See ya back Stateside, slick,” Agent Black said, allowing himself to be pushed toward the door by Agent White.

“
Is zer a problem?” the bartender asked.

“
Yeah. The glasses aren’t big enough.”

“
What is wrong wiz your friend?”

“
Napoleon complex.”

The barman shrugged and went off to find his friend again to say something else rude about Americans. Baby Joe downed his drink. He looked at himself long and hard in the mirror, then headed back to the restaurant. Asia and Crispin were still dancing. Still laughing. He didn’t know what any of it meant, but he was fucked if he was going to let it spoil their evening. Whatever it was, he would worry about it tomorrow. Let it come. There was only so much of this vacation shit you could put up with anyway.

Chapter 17

Harry’s Bar’s was a bit too upscale for a lowlife like Monsoon to feel really comfortable, but he could get used to it. Call it practice. As he tipped his head back to suck down the prohibitively expensive hooch, he suddenly started to feel weird in the head. It was as if his eyes were reversed and he could see his own brain, pulsating with a greenish-purple light inside his skull.

Like most Americans of a certain age, Monsoon had experimented with drugs, although in his case it wasn’t so much an experiment as a test drive. But he’d soon discovered that hallucinogenics weren’t his thing. In his line of work, you needed to be sharp and one step ahead of the game, and seeing pink elephants blowing bubblegum out of their asses while singing “Begin the Beguine” kind of took the edge off a guy’s play. So Monsoon generally stuck to more sensible mind-altering substances like blow and crack and PCP, and even then very infrequently on the grounds that, generally speaking, people expect you to pay for those, and the kind of people that expect you to pay for those are not the kind of people that it is advisable not to pay.

For sure Monsoon knew which end of the bottle was which, but he could handle his booze as well as the next guy, so even if the price of his poison was making his head spin, the grog itself couldn’t account for what he was experiencing. And since he tried religiously to keep spiritual matters to a minimum, visions, avatars, and manifestations were not normally on his agenda.

Which is what caused him to feel the first spider tickle of alarm creep down his collar when he looked in the barroom mirror and saw that the guy sitting next to him looked exactly like him. His initial reaction was that either someone had spiked his drink or the mirror was fucked. A surreptitious turn of the head revealed the worst. The guy sitting next to him was identical to him in every detail, down to the clothes he was wearing and the exorbitant Prunier VSOP that he was drinking. Monsoon decided not to panic. He closed his eyes, concentrated, and ordered his senses to get a grip. His senses told him to open his eyes the fuck up if he didn’t believe them.

The guy was still there, but not only that, the guy on the other side now looked like his twin. And the guy behind the bar, who had previously been a rat-faced, greasy, unshaven dago of some description, now looked just like Tiger Woods.

Monsoon broke out in a cold sweat. He slammed back his drink and held up his hand. Tiger Woods came over.

“
Same again, pal?” he said without a trace of a foreign accent.

“
Leave the fucking bottle, would ya?” Monsoon said.

Tiger brought him a bottle, and Monsoon sucked back on it. He took a deep breath. “Okay, asshole,” he said to himself. “You’re gonna close your eyes, open them again, and when you do, everything is going to be just hunky-dory, and not one of these French motherfuckers is going to look anything like you. Okay?”

Monsoon did as he had instructed himself to do. When he opened his eyes, not one of the French motherfuckers looked anything like him—
all
of them did. Every single swinging dick in the bar looked exactly like him. There was only one thing to do: scream in terror and run for the door.

Somebody tripped him up. Monsoon fell heavily. He felt himself grabbed by strong but somehow gentle hands, as if the hands were holding back. Monsoon thrashed about and kicked out. He threw a punch, blindly swinging into space. Someone slapped him across the face. Hard. It clattered his teeth and set his ears to ringing. He felt himself pushed back onto his barstool. He got slapped again, southpaw that time. It brought tears to his eyes. He blinked them away. When he finally stopped blinking, everything and everyone had gone back to normal, and there was an old guy with a white goatee looking at him with a kind of stern paternal gaze.

“
Strange sensation, my friend, no?” the man said.

“
What the fuck?” Monsoon said, employing his stock-in-trade comment reserved for such occasions.

The old man held out his hand. “Ooglas,” he said. “Duncan Ooglas.”

“
Did you just slap me, you old bastard?”

The old geezer didn’t look like he could slap his thigh at a pantomime. “I’m afraid it was necessary. You are not harmed, I trust.”

“
Necessary for what, pops?” Monsoon said, rubbing his cheek.

“
To dispel the illusion that everybody in the bar looks exactly like you.”

Monsoon’s face transitioned through an impressive array of expressions, smoothly switching gears from scared to surprised to suspicious to dumfounded and finally to just dumb.

“
What?” he said in a squeaky voice, his tonsils tinged by a touch of hysteria. “How did you know?”

“
I call it transmutation. The Germans have a word for it. Doppelgänger. Literally “double walker.” Someone who looks exactly like someone else. Typically, though, in the dark gothic German version, the doppelgänger is bad mojo, and if you see yours it’s a sign that you shouldn’t start reading any long books. Abraham Lincoln is said to have seen one, so maybe it’s a sign that you shouldn’t go to any long plays.

“
The English version is more mundane. A lookalike. Politicians are noted for using them. To stop bullets, usually. Down in Key West the people enjoy the annual Ernest Hemingway lookalike competition, and Dolly Parton is said to have once entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and lost. Makes you wonder about the gal that actually won. Jackie Chan’s stunt double actually looks more like Jackie Chan than Jackie Chan does, although this might be because Jackie mostly does his own stunts. Anyway, the point is, people who look remarkably like other people without being related to them do exist, which is just as well, because otherwise supermarkets would never get opened, and Harrison Ford would end up with a lot of black eyes. Oh, sorry, am I rambling on? Jet lag, I’m afraid. Not as young as I used to be, what?”

“
Yeah? Then you’re too old to be smokin’ that shit. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“
It’s the Chameleon Fallacy.”

“
Aw, not this fucking iguana crap again. How do you know about that?”

“
I invented it.”

“
Bullshit. Hyatt invented it.”

“
Hyatt stole it. From me. He was my student. He helped me with my experiments. I wanted to shut them down when I realized how dangerous it was, but Hyatt stole the formula. That’s why I’m here. To warn you.”

“
To warn me about what?”

“
The chameleon.”

“
To warn me about a fucking six-inch lizard?”

“
The chameleon doesn’t see things the way you and I do. That’s not to say it disagrees with our worldview. I mean, what it sees and what we see when we look at the same thing are not the same. Its eyes move independently, and it sees everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Its own eyes disagree with each other, passing different and sometimes contradictory information to the brain, so that what is true for its left eye is a lie for its right. It can also see in ultraviolet light. It sees where we see nothing. But the chameleon sees the truth, which is that there
is
no truth. The chameleon is the embodiment of the lie. This is what makes it such a successful predator. It is slow moving, has small teeth, has no claws, and yet it has survived for a hundred million years. Because it lies. It ceases to be there, yet it is there. It becomes indistinguishable from its background. It hides and waits and strikes when least expected, out of nowhere. The chameleon has no soul. It wants yours.”

“
Souls, assholes. Man, you are one crazy wigged-out old dude. Shouldn’t you be back in the sanatorium?”

“
The R3. It can’t be controlled. You saw what it just did to you. It’s thought engineering. Gestalt theory: the theory that we perceive the whole before we identify the individual parts. It’s evolutionary psychology. The Ponzo illusion that tells us one line is longer than another, the Kanizsa triangle that doesn’t exist although we see it, the ballerina who swings both ways, in the optical sense, I mean. The Penrose Triangle, the Devil’s Tuning Fork, impossible objects. Chronostasis. Pure mathematicians can prove that two parallel lines always meet. We’re talking about capricious evolution, the survival of the weirdest, an impulse toward increasingly unstable and unhinged organisms. Entropy on speed.

“
Hyatt doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. He just thinks he does. He’s a smart kid, but he’s not smart enough to realize how dumb he is. It’s where truth and knicker elastic conjoin. They can both be stretched, up to a point, and when they break, someone is usually fucked. In this case, it’s you. You are infected. You are infected because you have it in your possession. It must be destroyed.”

“
Are you fucking nuts, you old fart? You know how much this fucking thing is worth?”

“
I know what it will cost. Idiots like you will give it the power to reproduce itself. And then there is no telling what will happen. Imagine millions of R3s, each operating independently, developing, maybe combining, all making people believe in different realities. Truth control. Reality would cease to exist. Imagine seven billion people each speaking a different language. Each seeing something completely different. Space, time property, relationships, all subjective and ever changing.”

“
Fuck you. All it does is change people in the movies.”

“
That’s all it
did
, my friend. Now it makes everybody look exactly the same as you. In half an hour, who knows what it will do?”

“
You’re talking out of your wrinkled old ass. You don’t know shit.”

“
I actually do know shit, my friend. I can read the R3. It emits patterns, waves, microwaves, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, you name it. I have this.” Duncan Ooglas held up a device like an old-fashioned pocket watch. “I can track it. That’s why I’m here. That’s how I found you. And that’s why you must give it to me.”

“
Like hell I will.”

“
Then you will die. And so will many millions of others.”

“
So how come I ain’t dead already, Granddad?”

“
At this point, it is not inherently dangerous. It’s what it
will
do that is dangerous. It’s what it will make people see. What it will make them believe, what it will make them do to each other.”