Green and Red: a short story

(photo by Pavel Filatov http://www.pavelfilatov.com/gall/Altai_People/index.php?photo=15)

It was one of those days for Captain Kennard. A beat cop picked up a disheveled and confused man in an alley over on the wrong side of the tracks. Apparently, he was wishing people “Merry Christmas” and trying to convince people to sit on his lap. The fact that he was dressed as Santa Claus helped his case slightly. The fact that the calendar read June 21st hurt him considerably more.
“Show him in,” the Captain barked. Usually he would have let a couple of his younger blue boys work out some aggression on this creep and turn him back loose, but there was another element here that made this case more troubling. The man entered the office, stumbling a bit as a result of a rough shove from behind, courtesy of his escorting officer.
The perp was still dressed in his red, silken, tattered robe. His face wore a scraggly fake beard stained green in places that fell unevenly around his chin. He seemed drunk but lacked the stench of stale booze. He dropped into a half a heap when Captain Kennard gestured toward the chair.
“Name?”
“Nick.”
“First and last please.”
“Saint Nick.”
“Your real name please.”
“Kris.”
“Kris what?”
“Kris Kringle.”
The Captain could not believed he fell for it a second time. He did not appreciate humor on his best days, and this was far from that.
“Look freak, I don’t have time to deal with perverts harassing women and children walking down my streets. I wouldn’t think twice about you if you ended up as splatter on the pavement.”
Kennard hesitated here, not satisfied that he ended his last sentence strongly enough. He reminded himself that this one might have information. He needed to control his temper and stay focused. For the last two weeks amnesiacs had been turning up all over the city. Dozens of people apparently just forgot their entire lives and identity. Soon droves would be wandering the streets asking passersby where, when, whom, and what they are. The only connection between all the cases up to this point was a thin green line around the upper lip, almost like a milk mustache.
The nerds in the lab had yet to obtain a sample that could be analyzed, but that would irrelevant if the Captain could get a confession here. Picking this loony toon up turned up the break in the case they had been waiting, praying for: a tube of mysterious green was recovered in the alley not far from the supposed Father Christmas.
“All right very good Kris. Have it your way,” Kennard started up. “But please, answer me this: why is your beard green?”
“Green and red are the holiday colors,” Santa answered simply.
The Captain did not appreciate this reply. With one smooth motion he palmed the side of the suspect’s head and slammed it against the smooth-grain wooden surface between them.
“I’m not fucking around with you, clown.”
“I’m not a clown. I’m Santa Claus.”
“Santa,” the lack of reaction caused by his violent act only added to the Captain’s exasperation. “I have green-lipped people with zero recollection of their entire lives stumbling around my city. And, we just so happened to find a tube of green gel lying not far from you in the alley.”
“Yes, Christmas cheer has been spreading lately,” the scraggily beaded man nodded and smiled.
In fact, the detectives had mentioned that many of these lost individuals were also under the impression that it was Christmastime, but the Captain wasn’t going to say any to further encourage his interviewee. “This may be a game to you,” Kennard started again after regrouping. “But people’s lives are being destroyed here. Don’t you realize what you’re doing, if you are in fact doing this?”
“Do they seem happy?” Santa asked, apparently very curious about this.
“Are they happy?!” the Captain shrieked. “I don’t think you understand how much trouble you are in, bub. This is destroying lives and, if you are responsible, you’ll pay for it.” He tried to restrain his voice and state the second part as severely as possible.
The only discernible effects on the tirade’s target were inducing a wry grin and a slight twinkle in the filthy St. Nick’s right eye.
“Have you ever considered,” the disheveled Santa began, leaning forward and fixing brilliant blues eyes burning beneath the grime on his interrogator. “That the life they have forgotten was the false one? That they are beginning to wake up to the true reality? That it is, in fact, Christmas?”
The Captain felt the impulse to hit the man again, but his subject was talking now and the most important thing at the moment was to keep him going.
“I have a calendar here that would beg to differ. And the weather outside does not support your theory either,” Kennard pointed out as calmly as he could. The day was unseasonably hot even for June: over one hundred degrees and sticky with humidity. “Does it feel like December to you?”
The Santa spoke coherently, but the words that came out and the urgency on his face revealed him to be the madman they had suspected. “External conditions are always changing, and thus are no source of universal truth. What you call dates or months or seasons have nothing to do with Christmas. The First Christmas took place in a much warmer climate, and it probably didn’t even happen during the winter! And that’s exactly where we still are in time, the very moment when the Christos was born into the world.”
“What are you talking about?” Kennard stammered, completely baffled.
“When the Intercessor came into the world, The Adversary paused time and created a new version of history without Him in it. The False God casts this illusion over us hoping that we will accept this materialistic, consumerist reality and reject the true one: the one at the precipice of The Light coming back into the world. I only try to remind people that this Now is Christmas. That we are standing on the verge of the instance in time when Christos comes to Earth. All we have to do is wake up from this dream.”
“So you did do it?” The Captain demanded once he realized, after too many beats than he would later admit, that the desired confession had fallen into his lap.
“All I am is a vessel for The Light, an instrument of the Christos. All I have done or not done has been The Spirit of Christmas acting through me.”
Captain Kennard picked up his phone, barked “Get him out of my sight!” into the phone, and slammed it back down. Two lower-ranking officers burst into the office, grabbed the suspect Santa under each arm, and whisked him away.
What he said will probably hold up as a confession, Kennard reflected once alone. It would get this goofball off the streets for a while, but the Captain doubted that this one imposter Santa was really responsible for all the city-sweeping cases of amnesia. It was just as likely that this man had been attacked himself in that alley and the real assailant or assailants lost or intentionally dropped the tube at the scene. This one was too crazy to be the mastermind. This would’ve required organization. But the only way to be sure was to put Citizen Kandy Kane on ice for a while and see if any more green-mustachioed people popped up.
Captain Kennard propped his feet up on his desk and turned his gaze out the window. A lone bright star hung fat and heavy in the western skies, shining out through the twilight. It was snowing.