Saturday, November 29, 2008

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 3 of 5

Reader, you have not been abandoned. The time that has passed is meant to be an approximation of the time that has passed for Perlez and Dean, who were out on the cold road to Braunau when last we left them. A short time has passed for you, but that agony of waiting is a hint of the tribulations endured by our two time-lost scientists, who we rejoin months after we last saw them, in the last days of winter in Braunau.

Yes, the two reached their destination after months of journeying. What they suffered through was too harsh to imagine, and too cruel to describe. They were hungry; they were beggars. Some towns they stopped in for days at a time to do manual labour for the simple pleasures of food in the belly and a wall to stop the wind.

They rarely talked about the future anymore. Both men knew the requirements of their mission and had no need to remind each other of the rest. And in the simple requirements of bending one’s back to work in a mine or toil on a farm, they found a sort of respite from the horrors of disorientation that had plagued them so much at first. With a sort of brotherly pride, Perlez saw Dean stabilize his mind and find the solace of the momentary. Perhaps this was a tenuous grip on sanity, but how rare to ever grasp such a thing firmly.

The day was April 25, 1889, and the men had been in Braunau for over a week, lodging in a small inn on the outskirts of the town. They had been drawn to the place by its lack of visibility. When they had asked a man on the street for the location of the nearest inn, he pointed to the building right behind them and they realized this was the place for them. A white-haired couple ran the place, and they seemed to do it more as a hobby than an active business pursuit. Still, they had been a little wary of these two dirty drifters, with the fingers on their gloves worn clean through and the stink on their clothes making the dog choke. But Perlez and Dean were models of politeness, and after a few days of regular access to water and a clean bed, they even began to look respectable again.

The two had both managed to find work fairly quickly, much to their relief, as they needed to stay around the town until they completed their mission. Their first setback in Braunau had been one of the most crushing they had yet encountered. Armed with the name and location of an inn from the history books, they had gone to find the home of the Hitler family, only to discover that the inn was not there. Asking around town for its location proved fruitless--it did not exist, according to anyone they asked.

Both men were naturally concerned that history had changed in such a way as to obliterate the inn from time. Perhaps the family was not even living in Braunau. Still, they could not be certain. History books are wrong; facts get distorted. All they could do was watch the town for leads. And as they did that, Perlez would work for a local carpenter, while Dean worked at a large farm just outside the town limits.

The two men were a little lost at first as to how they could gain access to the Hitler family. It was not a large town, but as outsiders, they could not really go around asking about these people. Such behaviour would immediately raise suspicion and cause rumours to spread, perhaps even frightening the prey. All they could do was put themselves in a position to discreetly observe the family and perhaps somehow find a way to operate on the child.

Still, they had three years to accomplish their mission in this town before the Hitler family moved away--if the history books were still correct, which they might no longer be. In the early days of their time in Braunau, Perlez and Dean concentrated on simply creating a rhythm for their own lives, learning the town and its inhabitants, accustoming themselves to the ritual of daily labour and living in this epoch. After the months of uncertainty out on the road, there was something almost relaxing about waking up warm and knowing where you would be that day, and even better, knowing that you would fall asleep warm, in that same spot, nestled in the same tranquility you were feeling at that very moment. If the first danger had been disorientation, then this sense of stasis and security became the next threat to the mission, for the men could simply lose themselves in their lives at this point and become swallowed up in the rhythm to which they now clung.

Perlez was discovering this quite quickly as he sawed and hammered, each movement a form of seduction. He occasionally lost himself in the moment, only afterwards realizing that this was not his time and he had a mission to perform. How could he not? Try to saw a beam. You move forward and then back. Forward and back. Try to hammer a nail. The hammer moves up and down. Up and down. Every motion contains its opposition. Everything returns. When it was over, Perlez would look up, slightly lost for a moment. Wasn’t there more to his life than this hammer and nail? And then he would remember it all, but just for a second--the reporters asking him what he expected to find in the past, his wife crying as she said she was proud of him even though she would never forgive him, Dean’s troubled expression minutes before leaving when he asked if it was right that a suicidal gesture would make them immortal. Perlez remembered it all, and shivered. And Mr. Ostheim would see this and ask “Are you cold?” And Perlez would reply, “It must have just been a chill.”

It was a fine balance. When the pair was separated, each man alone found it quite easy to be drawn into the era. They did not quite forget who they originally were, but became who they pretended to be. Each man needed the other to remind him of his pretences, while at the same time, each needed space from the other in order to develop the façade that would allow both to survive and thrive in this epoch.

After work, Perlez would often stop in at one of the taverns around town. He tried to hit a different one each day, expecting (or hoping) that Adolf’s father would appear eventually. A black and white photograph of the man floated through Perlez’s memory as he scanned the crowds of labourers out to belt back a few before heading home. Sometimes they didn’t even bother doing that. They just stayed until they had to be dragged to their beds by half-drunk friends.

Perlez was obviously not one of those types. He had a few glasses of ale, read the paper, chatted lightly with a few men, but did not imbibe too much. He had to stay alert and attentive for a lead. Still, Dean would occasionally tease him, suggesting that perhaps he had developed an excessive fondness for the beer of the past, but Perlez waved off this talk, often quite angrily. This was one of the only ways available ways of gathering information about the town, save for whatever gossip they gleaned from their landlords or coworkers. What was Dean doing anyway to further the mission? Milking cows? Plowing fields? What did this have to do with anything? These conversations usually ended badly, with Perlez fuming while Dean sat in quiet dejection, unable or unwilling to defend himself.

More often, they just talked about their respective days and skirted the subject of the mission. Each presented the mundane facts of their daily routine--the progress of the building Perlez was working on, the gossip spread by the other labourers on the farm--as if one would find meaning where the other could not. The previous day, in fact, Perlez had finally acknowledged this absurdity when he said to Dean, “I don’t understand why this should mean more to me than it does to you.”

“Would it be better if I didn’t tell you anything at all?” Dean had responded, the curtness in his voice uncharacteristic. But even he had limits to his temper.

“It’s okay,” Perlez said, his voice sagging with resignation. “We have years.”

This silenced both men, and Perlez regretted it the instant he spoke. Of course they had years. They had their entire lives. Neither man had yet to overcome the drive to complete the mission quickly, as if they could go home whenever they had succeeded. There was no home. This was their home. They moved forward as fast as possible, but their every step was stretched over months. It had taken them so long to reach Braunau, and who knew how long it would take them to find the Hitlers and gain access to Adolf.

As Perlez sat in a pub called the Harrow on April 25, 1889, he contemplated the prospect of years of this. In the back of his mind, he still told himself this was the mission. And a year from now, would it still be the mission? Two years? And three? He tilted back a mug of the dark ale and swallowed. When did it cease to be the mission and simply become his life?

He sat at the bar, leaning against it and watching the inhabitants of the pub. For a place called the Harrow, the crowd seemed a strange mix of office workers and craft men. There were few farmers or agriculture workers, but plenty of clerks and cobblers and carpenters.

“Do you think the spring will be wet?” a young man next to Perlez said suddenly.

“What?” He hadn’t even been paying attention, but he turned to look at the young man, who seemed in his early twenties, at the oldest. He sat anxiously, shifting with a nervous energy.

“A wet spring,” he repeated, “Do you think we’ll have a wet spring?”

“Sure, why not?” Perlez said casually, as if the spring had been waiting for his permission.

“I think so too,” the young man agreed. “Are you a farmer?”

“Apprenticing to be a carpenter,” Perlez said. “And you?”

“My family is.” The young man downed the bottom half of his mug. Perlez felt uncomfortable about this strange, twitchy boy. Even as he was goading Perlez into inane conversation, he was barely committed to the very dialogue he was sparking.

“But what are you?” Perlez pressed on, resolved to get some solid fact out of this person, if nothing else.

“I guess I’m a farmer too,” the young man said. “I just help around a bit. I might try to get an apprenticeship in town.”

“Pick up a craft,” Perlez agreed. “It’s the way of the future.”

The young man looked at Perlez as if he had been insulted. He turned to the bartender and asked for another beer. As the young man was paying, Perlez turned his attention back to the crowd and scanned the people for the face in that black and white photograph he held in his memory, a picture of Hitler’s father.

When the young man received his beer, he took it and left the bar, heading for an empty table at the front of the pub near the window. He sat there alone, glowering at the crowd, drinking contemptuously. Perlez just tried to ignore him.

“Alois, how are you?” a voice called out suddenly, and Perlez’s body jolted so hard that he slid off his stool.

He scanned the crowd for the source of the voice (or the subject of its address) and spotted a tall middle-aged man, gaunt and clean-shaven, neatly dressed in a suit. Several people had stood to greet him, all gathering around to shake the man’s hand. He smiled thinly through it all, flustered and embarrassed by the attention. “Alois, congratulations!” a man at a table across the room called out. The tall man waved his hand in acknowledgement.

“So, how is the child?” someone asked. “And your wife, how is she?”

“Both are doing quite well,” the tall man said. “She was quite weak for the first couple of days, but she’s doing good now.”

“Oh, good, good,” the original voice said, sitting the tall man down at a table. “And the name?”

“Adolf.” The tall man smiled a bit sheepishly.

“Noble wolf,” the original voice chuckled.

“He’ll grow into it,” the tall man said, and the whole table laughed.

Perlez stared at the group so intently that they might have taken offence if they had been paying attention. But the mood was jubilant and colloquial, and the four men at the table were all too busy congratulating Alois to pay any heed to the lone man at the bar whose eyes were those of a starving man seeing food for the first time in a week. You might expect Perlez to leap to his feet and rejoice at this moment, but consider: there is a hesitation that comes from not knowing whether that roast dripping in gravy is salvation from the pain of hunger, or merely the first hallucination of a mind undone, the first sign of the end.

It is a sad state of affairs when a man cannot embrace the very reason he has for living when it at last appears to him, but there was at least grounds to pause in this case. Alois bore so little resemblance to the photograph in Perlez’s mind. Granted, he could have gained weight and grown facial hair later in life, but his height, his features--it all seemed wrong. But what was actually wrong here? The man? Or Perlez’s mind?

A great crash drew Perlez’s attention, and he saw that the young man had just knocked down one of the other patrons. The man on the ground seemed more amused than wounded, lying on his back and laughing at the spluttering rage of the young man. Two of the downed man’s friends held back the young man and the pub owner just sneered and said “Get him out of here.”

The two men threw him into the street and when he tried to stand, one gave him a mighty kick in the ribs that sent him back to the ground. He lay there, face in the dirt, and by the shaking of his body, Perlez guessed that he was crying. When his body stopped shaking, he stood up, face red, and walked away. The men inside at the table where the altercation had occurred laughed.

“Farm kids,” the pub owner sighed. “They can’t hold their liquor.”

When he turned his attention back to the table where Alois was sitting, Perlez saw the man getting up to leave. “Oh, stay a little longer,” one of the other men said.

“I wish I could,” Alois said, “but I do need to get back home. I just wanted to stop in for a quick one.”

“Well, we’ll be here,” the original voice said.

“Oh, I know it,” Alois responded with a smile, and they all laughed again.

Perlez threw down some money on the counter and walked out after the man. The streets were not crowded, so he tried to avoid following too closely. But a block away from the Harrow, Perlez encountered the young man again, still red-faced and livid.

“You’ve got to help me,” the young man said.

“What?” Perlez didn’t even look the young man in the face. His eyes were on Alois walking up the street.

“I just need someone to back me up, I can take him if he doesn’t set his friends on me again.”

“Kid, you’re drunk,” Perlez said, walking away.

The young man grabbed his shirt. “Fuck you,” he spit.

“Get off me.” Perlez shoved him away and he lost balance and fell down. Alois looked backed nervously and turned down a street. Perlez rushed after him, not glancing back at the young man, who tossed out several more curses.

Perlez caught sight of Alois making another turn just as he reached the corner and so he ran down the empty side street. When he reached where Alois had turned, he stopped to catch his breath and watched the man enter a blue building with a sign that said Gruber Inn. Perlez walked up to the building and saw stared at the windows from across the street. On the top floor, though the rooms seemed dark, he could make out the figure of Alois.

This had to be the place. True, the man did not quite match the photograph, but no matter--how much accuracy could they assume out of the past anyway? Some spiteful archivist, looking at a picture of the pompous father of a hated cousin and thinking to himself, “You, uncle, shall forever be known as Hitler’s father.” That was all it took to change everything.

Perlez made a mental note of the address and began to walk home. There was no need to shadow the place tonight; Alois had already seen him and might grow suspicious if he spotted Perlez lurking around.

As he walked home, a man running down the street stopped him and in a breathless voice asked, “Are you a doctor?”

“No. I’m not.”

The man made an exasperated noise and continued running down the street.

Perlez turned up the collar on his coat. The cooler night air was descending upon the town, taking the place of the light that had been there during the day. It was not dark, but the sun was low and the light was growing dimmer.

Around the Harrow, Perlez saw a crowd of people. That stupid kid, he thought to himself. Is he fighting again?

He paused behind the crowd and tried to look over the heads, but he couldn’t. All he could see was that the window had shattered.

“What happened?” he asked an older gentleman at the back of the group of onlookers.

“A fight broke out,” the older man said. “As you would expect of a place like this.”

Perlez strained on his toes to see over the crowd, which was growing thicker by the second.

“People don’t realize that these public houses breed a certain type of a man,” the older man continued. “I would never drink a drop. Brings out the worst in a man, you know?”

“Yeah,” Perlez said, moving away from older man. Between the heads of the people in the crowd, like a hole hidden in a hedge, Perlez could make out the body of the young man in the broken front window. His face and body were cut everywhere from broken glass, his torso impaled on a shard.

“He reaped what he sowed,” the older man said contemptuously.

* * *

When Perlez got back to the inn, the first thing Dean asked him was, “Are you hungry?”

“No.” Perlez sat down at the table and slumped down in his chair. He stared for a moment at nothing.

“Are you drunk?” Dean asked.

“No.” After a pause, he added, “I found Hitler.”

Dean’s face brightened. “You did? That’s fantastic! How did you do it? Where are they? Did you see the child?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“But I thought you said--”

“No, I know where they live. But that’s all.”

In the weary tone of Perlez’s voice, Dean sensed something amiss. “Are you sure it’s them?”

“I followed the father home. He didn’t looked like the picture, but his name was Alois and his son was named Adolf.”

Dean smiled. “Well, that sounds pretty close to me.”

“You’re right,” Perlez sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”

Dean sat down at the table across from his colleague. “That’s okay.”

For a moment, neither said a word, and Perlez was aware of Dean’s eyes on him, examining him. Whenever Perlez grew quiet or withdrawn, or so angry and frustrated he could not speak, Dean would just stare at him, as if he would somehow draw all of the information he needed just through close consideration of the man. As if his face betrayed him, his gestures sold him out, the sweat on his brow said things he couldn’t silence. In his passive way, Dean was demanding information, and Perlez would not give it. This thing that he had seen, that he had been--yes, it was true--involved in, belonged only to him. He would not burden Dean with it.

“I’m stepping out,” he declared, standing up suddenly.

Dean shifted nervously in his chair. “But you just came in.”

“It’s okay,” he replied. “I just need to think a bit about a plan. That’s all.”

Perlez grabbed his coat and walked out, leaving Dean sitting at the table in the dimming room. And after a while, unable to sit any longer, Dean stood, and walked around the room.

The apartment they were renting was spare, and Dean had come to know it well in the short time the two men had occupied it. Little wonder, since as Perlez sulked in pubs and wandered the streets restlessly, Dean paced, Dean sat, Dean waited.

There was the sitting room, where he now stood, with its table and four chairs, plus two upholstered chairs flanked by two small stands. And then there were the two bedrooms, each with a single bed, a nightstand, and an armoire. The floors were wooden and worn down in places. Each room had a single faded green rug.

If this sounds oppressively barren, save your pity for someone else. Dean appreciated the austerity. In the future, he had lived in clutter. His home had been a mess of accumulation. He bought things, bought things to store the things he had bought, bought things to expand the storage capacity of the things he had bought to store the things he had bought before, and so on--an endless march of consumption in which he became an accessory to the things he owned. Maybe all of the clutter was a way of holding on to his money, and the time spent earning it, rather than throwing it away. Each object in his home had been earned by a certain expenditure of his life, and each object contained some trace of that discarded essence, retained in a flimsy gesture towards immortality.

Perhaps this had been the greatest shock of the past for Dean. The people here spent money with a casual disregard for its worth. They were only beginning to discover the immense gravity of things, the sheer burden of possession--possession, that ambiguous word which referred to owning and being owned. Instead, these strange people, these savages--as the more blunt historians of Dean’s day might say--spent their days working and their nights wasting their money on food and drink and little more. Did they save? Did they even believe in the future? When Dean looked out and saw his coworkers heading out to drink their day’s wages, he wondered, do they think they will be dead tomorrow? And so he paced the room, learning to appreciate its emptiness.

Emptiness is not an obvious virtue to appreciate, of course. He walked the room, emptied of life, of things, of time. If there was nothing on the nightstand, it did not bother him. He did not think it needed something. When he looked at that empty space, he took pleasure in the fact that nothing was there. And he was a little disappointed at the thought that something would probably fill this space eventually. First, a new building in a few decades. A wall, a desk, a water pipe. Then, the building gone: a street light, a road, cars, trucks, birds. Another building: a bed, a body, two bodies, no bodies, dust, air. On and on, until ten thousand years later, and only ice, a glacier as wide as a city. And beyond that (how many tens of thousands of years would it take?): fire. And then, at last, nothing. Time might seem to be calling the shots now, but Dean knew: the real winner would always be emptiness.

This was how Dean spent his evenings. On a certain level, he understood he was failing the mission. Obviously, there had to be time for adjustment to the past, but that should have past by now. He had ceased to experience the disorienting episodes in which his identity faded and his memories blurred with hallucinations; he could even read the newspapers once in a while and not feel himself to be an escaped mental patient.

But how to fit into the era? At the farm, the other labourers laughed and talked about loves, fights, families. He smiled quietly through it all, withdrawn but friendly. The others accepted it, although it was not hard to detect a little resentment, as if his reticence was also a judgment (which, he was loathe to admit, it probably was).

But perhaps it did not matter now that Perlez had found the family. They could carry out the mission and then have a lifetime to adjust to this commitment, this horrible commitment to a time that had no use for them and would never know what they had done for (or to) it.

There was one thing that worried Dean about completing the mission. While Perlez pushed forward with his characteristic obstinacy, Dean felt himself dragged along, almost fearing completion of the mission. For this mission was their everything--it was the goal they worked for, the principle that organized their damaged lives--and once they completed it, what then? If Dean was living for the completion of the mission, why on earth should he ever complete it? The moment of success would be his death.

These thoughts were madness, he knew it. They signalled a betrayal of the values for which he had thrown away his future. And Perlez’s sacrifice? Would he betray that as well?

There was simply too much defy. He could harbour these agonies, but never set them loose. All he could do was fulfill his obligation--to the future, to Perlez--and then, when it was all done, he would find a house somewhere, a quiet house with large empty rooms and a view of nothing in particular, just some trees and grass, that would be enough.

Realizing the darkness of the room, Dean lit a candle and sat back at the table. He rested his head on his arm, and stared at the wallpaper on the opposite side of the room. The candle cast a thin cover of light over it, like a veil upon the darkness, and Dean watched how the flickering of the candle made this veil seem to flutter as if caught in a breeze.

When the door opened, Dean lifted his head from his sleepy reverie. Perlez entered, coat torn, pants dirty, face bruised, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. He stood in the doorway, looking down at Dean, who said nothing but just stared up at his colleague with uncomprehending eyes.

“Have you not moved from that spot since I left?” Perlez asked. Without waiting for an answer, he walked into his room and Dean watched him splashing his face with water from his washbasin. And then he spat into the water, and shut the door.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Joe!!! What happens next??? I need to know!