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kleenexwoman.livejournal.com
The woman at the drugstore, with freckles and eyes that droop and lanky unwashed hair, hands Illya his change and the bills are folded like so. We need a revolution. He reads it and stares at her, but her expression shows no change, no sign of recognition. She pops her gum and asks him if he needs a bag for his toothpaste and soap. He unfolds the bills and smooths them out on the counter, then crumples them up and sticks them in his pocket, convincing himself he has imagined it.
A week later, in San Veronica, where the dark-skinned peasants avert their eyes from the white men in suits and Generalissimo Mostra smiles and shakes their hands and assures them that everything is fine, that the decaying force of THRUSH has not gotten a foothold in the green and lush island. Illya feels something soft and crumpled in his hand, and waits until they are out of the palace to look at it. A thousand peseta note, folded and folded again until it says necesitamos una revolución, and he shows it to Napoleon. Napoleon frowns. "Was he trying to bribe you? What for?" and Illya does not know if he cannot see it or if he refuses to.
Paris, France. Illya is playing the part of a college student, a role he slips into easily. The dossier speaks of unrest, but he doesn't see any in the faces of the happy, laughing schoolboys he befriends, in the ancient wine shop they spend their days in, the run-down flat they all live in together. He feels old around them, older than he has for a long time--he doesn't remember being that young, that careless, that assured of the benevolence of the future. There must be something there, and he searches for it ceaselessly. One drunken night, he is still the most sober when the wine runs out, and the group pools their money to send him to the wine shop, pressing franc notes into his hands. He goes to fetch as many bottles of the cheap red they favor as he can, and the notes in his hands when he takes them out overlap and crumple to read nous avons besoin d'une révolution. It cannot be a coincidence, but what can it be?
It is a joke on him, he thinks. He is a dyed-in-the-wool Communist gone Western, given over to the pleasures of easy luxury, made easy for some only because so many cannot have them at all. It is not the people who beg him for this; it is the universe, reminding him of what he has slowly drifted from and what he now is. A call to arms sent to him through the very medium which prevents it. He knows he cannot do it. He has the means, yes, and he has the tools and the knowledge to do it--to start something, to aid it, even if he cannot do it himself. But he no longer has the will, the desire. He would hobble himself if he even tried.
In the spirit of experimentation, he spends an evening performing an idiosyncratic kind of origami, and the next morning he passes on the message to a teenaged boy playing guitar in Central Park with his guitar case open to encourage donations. The message no longer comes to him, and he does not know if he is relieved.
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