Give It A Spin Marcy

“I wondered how many times I would have to keep meeting with liars who were pretending that they were trying to help people. I actually became a politician to help people, not get rich. Now they're after me,” I said.

“Good line,” Marsha responded. “Either you’re bullshitting me or you’re as naïve as hell.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Come on. Everybody’s running a game. Why would you try to help people who don’t want it?” She leaned back and crossed her legs. She cocked her head slightly and grinned. A beautiful smile with thick lips, brown skin, perfectly styled hair with many long curls. “So?”

“So what?” I said.

“So what is it Bill, or should I call you William, or Mr. Chairmen or…?”

“Just call me Bill, Marsha. And I don’t think I'm naïve or insincere. I don’t appreciate the insinuation either.”

“I’m sorry. I was just joking, a little bit.” I frowned. “Partially,” She added. I took a deep breath and she smiled. I shook my head.

“So what can you do for me? I’m caught up in a fake scandal because I stepped on the wrong toes. Nothing in the open. All of it is behind the scenes because they know if it ever comes out in the open they'll be proven wrong and heads will roll.”

“I’ll take care of it,” She said.

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. It’s not hard to find out what’s brewing behind the scenes for us. I have a lot of insiders in place.”

“Oh, do you? And how long has that been going on?”

“Do you want my help or not, Chairman Brent?” I just looked at her for a moment. I really needed this. I sighed and lowered my head. I looked up into her piercing eyes. I think she was nervous. Maybe she had said a little too much and thought I was going to back out of this thing. I was going to have to pay a lot for this, from what I had heard. What would happen if I did back out? “I’m in,” I simply found myself saying. I felt like a coward. She smiled pleasantly.

“Put your faith in us. You haven’t made a mistake, I promise.”

“OK. What’s the next step? Where do I sign?”

“Not necessary. A verbal agreement is good enough, and a handshake.” She extended her hand and I shook it. I felt a tingling sensation moving up my arm and flowing into my heart. It was pleasant, but frightening. She smiled more. “Good. We have a deal. This whole conversation has been recorded. When we're done with the transaction it will be destroyed.”

“Wait a minute!”

“I assure you we won’t blackmail you, Bill. It’s bad for business.” I looked at her through narrowed lids.

“The payment,” I simply said. She ran her finger around the lip of her coffee cup and then looked up.

“When we need you, you’ll be there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When we need you, you’ll be there. That simple. It won’t be outrageous and will be one thing. Just trust us, OK?”

“That’s crazy, Marsha.”

“Yes. It is, but it's the way we work. Let me see.” She looked up a few moments as if thinking. “I’m coming to your house and we have to be seen together for the next few months like we're lovers or engaged.”

“What the heck?”

“You said you wanted us to help. Is it true or not? You have references.”

“Perfect references.”

“Well?” She tilted her head slightly.

“OK.”

“I’ll be over then, tonight.” I just sat and looked at her. She grinned, laughed to herself and stood up. I looked up at her expecting her to say something when she just turned and walked out. Had I made a deal with the devil or what?

***

Chairman Tim Scott and I sat in my secondary office (because if was off campus and secured) looking at a raging fire and sipping brandy. I turned to him. He smiled. Tim was a tall man, a former athlete. He was one of the few white guys I knew who had played professional basketball for a stint. He still had the athletic look with short red hair and ruddy complexion in comparison to my darker complexion.

I was one of those people who looked Mediterranean, meaning I could have come from anywhere in the world. In actuality I had come from Harlem. I was a transplant from Harlem to Oakland as a child and grew up there. With mixed raced parents of African and Latin descent, I fit in well. I Don’t know how I started to get interested in politics. I must have been crazy.

We lit up cigars. I turned to him again. “I met your lady,” I said. He grinned and looked at me.

“What do you think? Rather odd aren’t they, but effective.”

“Yeah. Odd to say the least, but the cost?”

“Don’t worry. They’re true to their word.” He took a puff of his cigar. “Did you do the handshake?” He grinned.

“Yeah. What the heck was that?”

“That was your contract.” He leaned back on his elbow and looked at me. “They aren’t human you know. She did tell you that.”

“‘What? No. You’ve got to be kidding. What the hell are they?”

“Alien Artificial Life Forms, I think.” I burst out laughing as he puffed his cigar again. He grinned too. "I’m smiling, but I’m serious. It was hard for me to believe too. It was harder not to tell anyone about it. Since you had the heart thing done I can talk to you about it. I would have had a heart attack if I tried to tell anybody about it who didn’t. Something about nanobots programmed to shut you down if you say the wrong combinations of words.”

“That’s impossible, Tim. You’re saying they're aliens and they're robots too? That woman wasn’t like any robot I’ve ever seen.”

“Not robots, Artificial Life Forms. They're very sophisticated. The least you know about them the better. I learned about them because I'm on the committee that explores…”

“Extraterrestrial Interactions,” I finished. I laughed to myself. “Yeah. Always thought that would be an easy committee.”

“Me too, until I was targeted by other aliens disguised as human beings. Then the ALFs, as they call themselves, got in touch with me. They made all the false accusations disappear. I don’t know how they did it, but they did, and I paid them off.”

“How did you do that?”

“The rest of the committee doesn’t know about them. No one knows about them. My promise was silence and steering the committee away from finding any information about them. I made sure to erase anything…anything that would allow anyone to believe in their existence, and even hid some real nutty suggestions about their existence deep down so if people found them they would think some psycho entered it.”

“You did a lot. Maybe too much. Way against the law, Tim. You know I’m not going to say anything about it, but they have you over a barrel now.”

“No they don’t. They don’t do that because they don’t need to. They can kill you, you know? Probably listening in right now. Those nanos make you a microphone, Bill. Mine have been removed, or made dormant.”

“So they’ve bugged me?”

“You could say that they've made you into a bug.”

“I don’t know about this. You may have gotten me into more trouble than I was in.”

“No. You don’t know how powerful those others are. They had destruction lined up for you just like they had for me. I was skiing with a friend. We went down a really hard trail when she hit a tree. I went for help, but couldn’t find anyone."

A blizzard came up and I tracked around for hours and hours in that snow until a patrol found me. I took them to her and she barely survived. I was really messed up myself. I was glad she survived, but she had to get these horrible robotic limb replacements. I spent months recovering from all kinds of frostbite, and thought I was going to lose my toes.”

What? Twenty three years later and she is accusing me of leaving her to die alone there in the snow. We were best of friends and they turned her against me. The person leading the team who found me said I was in a lounge having a drink. They had waitstaff who backed it up. I don't even know what lounge they were talking about, or if those people really worked at some lounge."

It was ridiculous, but enough to destroy my life and my career, and all I’ve been working for. It’s all because I'm honest and was working to create a community action program that would secure funding for educating people who were poor and dispossessed."

It would have been in competition with the privatized charters. On top of that, I was pushing to let the people know about some devices we discovered that could run off of the Earth’s magnetic field, which put me in opposition to the petroleum and nuclear energy corporations. That’s it! The groups got together and decided I needed to be deep-sixed. You know in the long run they're all run by the same people don't you?”

“You know how to make powerful enemies," I said. "Just how did our friends take care of that?”

“No idea. Somehow witnesses who saw what happened stepped up. Satellite photos picking up images of what I was doing at the time appeared. All kinds of things I didn’t even know existed.” He paused and then looked at me sincerely. “I think they are the good ones. I don’t mind covering for them.”

“They better be, because one of them is moving in with me.” He grinned and then laughed.

“I don’t know about their methods, but they work. Now remember, if you talk about this with anyone else, I think you know what will happen.’

“They’ll kill me?”

“You’ve got it, or worse.”

“What can be worse than death?”

“I don’t think you want to know that.”

***

I pulled up into my driveway. It was late, almost 1 in the morning. There was a car parked there. I pulled in beside it. I got out and looked at it. I had never seen one like it. It was a Ford Maverick that looked like it was from the sixties. Where did that come from? I think it was a replica, considering it was 2030 and no one was using gasoline anymore. I walked up to the house. Before I could put my key in the lock the door opened. Marsha was already there.

She looked relaxed in jeans, an oversized baggy sweatshirt, and a smile on her face. The warmth of the house rolled over me as I stepped in from the cold winter and she handed me a warm brandy from the small table located next to the door. She picked up her own.

“Welcome home,” Billy, she said. I was speechless. “Come on in. Don’t let the heat out.” I walked in. The living room was dark except for a roaring fire in the fireplace. I must admit that it was nice to come home to a blazing fire. I removed my coat and put it in the coat closet before stepping into the room. She was sitting on the couch. She motioned to the adjacent leather chair. “Have a seat. Hope you’re not offended. We decided to step things up.”

“Did we? And where is the housekeeper?”

“Away, on vacation. Where have you been?”

“Work. Talking with a friend.”

“Ah. That work included smoking a cigar and drinking brandy? I can pick it up on you, you know?”

“Yes, it does, sometimes. What are you doing here?”

“I told you when we were in the restaurant. Was I too vague? Why wouldn’t your old girlfriend come visit you?” I looked on the mantle and saw a picture of us together in college. I didn’t know her in college. I got up, walked over and looked at the picture.

“Where’d this come from?”

“That’s Halloween Night. We had been out all night drinking at the frat houses and then we came back to your room and...you know.” She got up, took the picture from my hand and sat it on the mantle again. She placed her hands on my temples. I could feel that strange tingling sensation again. “You know.” I began to remember a whole life with her throughout college and how disappointed I was when she married someone else. I remembered coming across her name about a month ago on social media and us reconnecting. Now here she was in my life again. Marcy Lethrop. It was crazy.

“How did you…?”

“Shush. Don’t you worry. We’re back together again, aren’t we? That was a terrible night, but it all worked out.”

I remembered walking back from a frat party. A group of racists started trying to harass her in the alley way because she had left alone before me. When I caught them they thought I would just stand there. There was a tussle. I was a martial artist at the time and really hurt a couple of them. We made it back home and made passionate love.” I looked at her while remembering that part. Wow. It seemed so real.

“Wow,” she mouthed. “You have to spin it, Bill.”

“Spin it Marsha?”

Yes, spin it. Soon there will be a complaint about your hatred for white people and your crazy drunken attack on white students who were just walking home minding their own business. You took a stick and you, along with three others, commenced to pummel one of them into unconsciousness. People don’t like your stances on the inclusion of anti-racist curriculum in public schools. What are they calling it, Critical Race Theory?”

One of the black men with you has admitted this and has leaked the information to the Daily Letter, one of those trash newspapers. He's expecting to do the talk show circuit to make money off the record, of course. Don’t deny the fight. Use it to your advantage. Now the one pummeled was a known rapist on campus and their are reports of various date rapes committed by him. It’s in the campus police records. You knew it. I left ahead of you. You heard me screaming in the alleyway between the frat houses, came upon them trying to rape me and saved me. You remember it right?"

“I do. Which is amazing because it never happened.”

“They make things that never happened seem to have happened. We can use it to our advantage. Their informant will be found to have links with the Chinese government. You'll become a hero overnight to every woman in this country, and someone targeted by a country people have been taught to hate. So what do you want me to do? She asked.

“Give it a Spin, Marcy. But what will this cost me?”

“We’ll think about it. Maybe becoming a mentor to a friend who will be interested in politics some day, or something else.”

“A friend. Is that what you call them?”

“That’s what you can call us. Now sit down and relax. We’ll talk more about business in the morning.”

“And what will the sleeping arrangements be?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about that in the morning too. You have a spare room. I’ll use that tonight.”

“How long will you be here?” I asked flatly.

“Now that’s another story.”

The End

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