Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 5 of 5

Reader, this is it: the end.

I wish I could tell you all about the lives of Perlez and Dean after the “completion” of their mission, all of the side streets they walked down, all the houses they entered. I wish I could tell you who they loved and hated, because this might give us some hope of understanding what they did, and through that, the world they made, which is the world that made us. Some may contest that point, but I stand behind it. Even if only through inaction and failure, they are responsible.

Sadly, little is known about their lives after they left that apartment. The only real stipulation that the future placed on them was that they must report the details of their mission, which each man fulfilled dutifully. Sealed in the time capsule buried at the assigned location near Hof, the scientists of the future would pull out twin reports from Perlez and Dean. Each man had written his own separate account of the journey to Braunau and what transpired there, and from those reports, this record has been extrapolated. I do not know if either man read the report of the other, but I rather doubt it.

However, this is not all that was found in the capsule. Perlez did include an additional report that covered some additional ground, sketching in details of his post-Braunau life while directly addressing the future. It is a curious report, to put it mildly, and many dismiss it as the ravings of a disturbed mind. This is a gross oversight, I believe. Perlez has much to tell us, if we care to listen. Granted, the veracity of it all cannot be assured, but we really have no reason to believe anything these men wrote in their reports is true. Who is to say the mental state of Perlez was any more stable when he wrote the first report than when he wrote the second. Few like to admit this, but the two men could very easily be making excuses for their failures, rather than presenting an accurate and true representation of their mission.

We cannot turn to the records or the history books to confirm what happened to either man. Neither seems to have made a trace on the historical record. They are writing to us from oblivion, the white void between the lines where millions of peasants and proletarians have lived and died without even leaving a corpse in the bone yard that is the historical record. Perhaps we cannot trust Perlez and Dean, but have we even earned their trust? They may have no use for the future, but it is clear that the future has no use for them as well.

The second report was written in the same hand that wrote the first, and there is little change in the handwriting, though the quality of the pen seems to have improved measurably between the writing of the two. But the second report is clearly the messier of the two. The first is quite clean--no crossed out words, few spelling errors. I suspect it is a final draft of an early version. Undoubtedly, both men chose their words carefully when telling us what had happened.

Perlez’s second report is written more like a draft. Many words are crossed out, usually scribbled until all that remains is a dark cloud of black ink, hovering over some blithe word on the line below. Sometimes, extra words and half-sentences are written in the margins with arrows drawn to where they go on the line. It seems likely that Perlez wrote it, and then revised it, censoring himself in places, shifting the tone in others, correcting the most embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors without paying particular concern to the scattershot structure of the whole report. The messiness is often cited as evidence of Perlez’s disturbed state as he wrote this report, as if it were nothing more than feverish ranting. This, I believe, is pure nonsense. Would a lunatic bother to fix the spelling of “embarrassed” (missing an r, and then crossed out and spelled correctly)? Would a disturbed man change the following sentence, “He never understood the consequences of his inaction,” to “He never quite grasped the consequences of his inaction”? The first displays a certainty of tone undercut by the second, which suggests “he” at least tried to fathom the consequences, even if only to fail in the end. There is a softening of tone, a grammatical diplomacy, that suggests self-questioning on the part of Perlez--hardly characteristic of a disturbed mind, which does not gain perspective, as these revisions suggest, but rather loses it.

Still, it is hard not to question how the messy document got into the time capsule. It seems like a work in progress, but if Perlez were unable to finish it, then how did it wind up in the capsule? Presumably, he was the only one with knowledge of the capsule, outside of Dean (who was already dead when the second report was written). One can reasonably assume that someone else--perhaps entrusted by Perlez--placed the report in the capsule after Perlez was unable to finish his work, either through illness or death. The questions that such a scenario raises, however, are troubling and impossible to answer. How did this knowledge affect the person? Were they aware of what they were being asked to do? Did they act upon this knowledge in a way that somehow altered the future?

The other prospect--and I believe this one to be the most likely--is that Perlez simply grew tired of revising the second report and buried it, along with whatever lingering self-recriminations he may have had about the mission and his life. Dwelling on these matters can be difficult enough for objective observers, but to have been an active participant in this story and then find yourself going over and over the details to try and understand what went wrong is probably too much for any man to bear. I imagine he simply put down his pen and walked away from it, and the report supports such an interpretation.

Perlez covers much of his life story in the report, albeit only in a summary fashion. There seem to be large swaths of years that he is uncomfortable describing, and at several points, he alludes to substance abuse while not offering details. The years directly after leaving Braunau are particularly grim, and Perlez dispatches them with a simple phrase: “I wandered.”

But where? And what did he do? We must keep in mind that every step they took in the past was potentially destructive, always displacing something that would have been undisturbed otherwise. This was treated as one of the acceptable risks of the mission: so long as neither man procreated (and it was assured they could not) or killed, then the only significant change they could produce was the prevention of World War II.

But in those first few years, Perlez was certainly distraught enough to behave recklessly, if not monstrously. Poring over newspaper records of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Germany and Austria, scholars often point out traces of Perlez. “Ether addict attacks police officer, runs away unapprehended” is one headline that often appears when people make the argument that Perlez somehow wandered onto the stage of history, however briefly, during these years.

After almost a decade of wandering, he found himself at Hof, and he remembered the location of the time capsule. On an instinct, he went to the spot and searched. He found it, and inside was Dean’s report, sealed for posterity.

The existence of this report seemed to stabilize Perlez’s sense of duty, long adrift on a narcotic sea. Or perhaps it was simply the memory of his colleague, and the thought that he was still out there, existing somehow despite his dread of this time. Something seemed to shift in Perlez at this point, and while the man is quite unable to articulate the epiphany in the hobbled mixture of diary and scientific prose that makes up the second report, there is no doubt that the epiphany occurred.

The next few years were spent living around Hof, with the first year spent writing his mission report. Remarkably, given the distance of more than ten years from the actual events, Perlez is extremely articulate and precise in his recollection of events. It is possible that distance favoured reflection, or maybe the lost decade simply disappeared from his memory so that the events in Braunau were as vivid as last week. Or maybe, as the single defining purpose of his life, it is only reasonable that Perlez would not lose these events to the fog of memory. “I have spent the last decade trying to avoid these events,” he wrote, “but it seems I will always live each of these days over and over. It is not that I cannot forget; forgetting was easily bought. It is just that I cannot remember. When I think upon them, they seem to be happening now. I remember the present. I live the past.” These words are taken from the first report, which, curiously enough, is regarded as the more mentally balanced of the two reports written by Perlez.

The rest of the years in Hof were spent doing carpentry, the profession he had picked up a decade before and then abandoned. He described these years as peaceful, if lonely.

When the First World War could be seen skulking on the horizon, Perlez made the wise decision of absconding to Switzerland before anyone knew what was happening. For a man in his position, there seemed little other choice. If he stayed in Germany, he could have easily found himself conscripted into fighting. Even if he avoided the frontlines and found a quiet spot in the countryside to hide out the war, there was always the danger of the battlefield finding him at some point and forcing upon him the choice that was not a choice: defend himself or die.

The years in exile were hardly happy for Perlez. He immediately missed the stability of his home near Hof, the tranquil life he had earned through years of disquiet. Switzerland was filled with exiles during those years, but even amongst the displaced and dispossessed, Perlez did not find equals. There is a vast difference between being exiled from a place and being exiled from a time. There was only one man who was Perlez’s equal, his twin, and he had abandoned that man long ago. “If Dean were here,” Perlez wrote of the rooming house he stayed at for several years, “he would have hated this room, with its abominable clutter and oppressive sense of decoration. It reminds me of the future.”

When the war was over, Perlez returned to Hof once more, a place as battered as any other in Germany. He recognized some faces in the town, but everyone seemed to have aged ten years, not just four, even as he felt to have not aged at all. It was like time travel once again. Or was this how everyone experienced time in this era, not as a tangible, quantifiable object that was bought and sold, bottled and stored, but rather as a state akin to waking from a dream? That time was the epiphany in which you stopped living but for a moment in order to tabulate all that you had lost and gained?

If so, Perlez could not yet bring himself to make these calculations. He became the town drunkard, a sop to the inferiority of others. Sure, we are all wretches, the townspeople could say, but at least we are not that wretched. And then they could point at this staggering fool of a man, who fell down in the street, too drunk to walk, and say, that is the worst of us, secure in the knowledge that as long as he existed, no one could point at them and utter those words. And as they sneered fondly at him, Perlez all the while contained all the thoughts of their destruction and salvation behind a wall of alcohol. If they knew what he knew, would they only hate him more?

When Dean returned, Perlez at first thought it was a hallucination, just another guilty thought to torment him. But it was the real thing, returned to Hof for reasons quite unclear at first. He had bought a cottage on the outskirts of town after having worked in Spain for many years. In his diligence and thrift, he had saved up enough money to retire and quietly watch the tragedy of the century play out.

But why Hof? Dean would not respond clearly to these questions, although perhaps he did not have a clear answer himself. It seemed like the only natural place to end his days.

All of this autumnal talk confused Perlez at first. But it was only as he looked at Dean with a sober mind that he realized how much the man had aged, and therefore, he himself had aged. “I started crying the first time I realized it was 1926,” Perlez writes at one point in the second report. The phrase begs the question: was there a second time he realized it was 1926? A third? How many times did he need to realize this before it finally stuck?

That year was a particularly hard one for Perlez, as he began drying out. He stayed at Dean’s cottage, his body ravaged by shakes and hallucinations. The wind outside the house made a hideous music at night, like pigs squealing in a barn. Whenever the wind died for a second, it was as if a pig’s throat had been slit. But others always rose up to take its place. He would tell Dean to turn off the record and the man never had a response that could still the terror Perlez felt at this noise. They both suffered through the nights.

However, Perlez did make it past these difficult first steps and achieved something resembling balance once more. He seemed more humble, frailer, but he felt that perhaps this fragility was his true state, and if he embraced it, he would live longer than if he hid it. Like so many other things in his life, this was mere theory, and the execution would prove difficult, if not impossible.

After recovering sufficiently, he left the cottage, unwilling to burden Dean anymore. The man protested perfunctorily, but with little passion. Perlez sensed that his colleague had helped out of a basic sense of duty, and that to stay any longer would be a gross exploitation of the man’s decency. Once Perlez had sobered up, he could not shake the feeling that whatever bond had existed between them decades ago was gone. What existed now was simply the obligation towards that bond, and not the thing itself. But more significantly, both men knew that there was no one else on the planet with whom they could relax the tension in their shoulders, that aching in their spine, for just one moment.

Perlez went back to work, doing labour on an assembly line at a car factory in town. The people around him were half his age, and they rarely interacted with him. They went out drinking on weekends, married their pregnant girlfriends, complained about inflation. They lived their lives and he his own, and if the two were to ever intersect, both would be set on fire by the collision.

He rarely saw Dean during the late twenties, save for a shared meal a couple of times a year. Neither really had much to say, and at this point, all they could do was enjoy the relief of silence in each other’s company. They both were well aware of the world around them and what was happening in Berlin, but neither ever brought it up when they were together.

By 1929, Perlez had retired from the factory, eking out a meagre pension in his senior years. He lived in a run-down apartment filled with other impoverished elders and poor students and addicts. For all of the grinding demoralization of this poverty, he at least never lacked entertainment. There was always something happening on the street whenever he looked out the window, always a soap opera playing whenever he put his ear to the wall.

It was late in 1929 when Perlez realized that Dean was ill. With months passing between visits, it was increasingly evident that the health of Dean was fading. Had Perlez seen his colleague every day, the deterioration might have been imperceptible, but every time he saw Dean, the man seemed to lose weight and appear more pale. But still, he said nothing, merely noting how Dean barely ate, just pushed food around the plate and took a few bites.

The next time he visited Dean early in 1930, Perlez was shocked by how enfeebled his colleague had become. When he knocked at the door, he waited for what seemed like an eternity, only to find Dean slow and bent, barely lifting his feet as he walked. But there was still food on the table, a small, meagre meal, yet still hot and steaming.

“You’re ill,” Perlez accused.

“Yes,” Dean replied and sat down at the table.

“What’s wrong?” Perlez did not sit.

Dean shrugged.

“Can you even eat anymore?”

At first, Dean hesitated, perhaps hoping to somehow bluff his way through this, but he seemed to relinquish that illusion, finally speaking, “No, not really.” He added, “Mostly liquids, I can manage. But I don’t really bother with solids anymore.”

“You’re wasting away.”

Dean smiled. “We all go some way.”

Perlez’s expression was horrified. “But haven’t you tried to eat, are you just giving up?”

The muscles in Dean’s face shifted, and Perlez was struck by how long it took his colleague to change expressions, as if even that was now a huge burden on his weakened constitution. After a while, Dean’s face reconstituted itself into a picture of irritation. “Of course I’ve tried,” he said. “I just can’t anymore.”

“Cancer,” Perlez said, mostly to himself, “it must be cancer.”

“I don’t care what it is.”

“It’s cancer.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence fell between the two men. The food was cooling in its bowl--a thin broth, it appeared to Perlez.

“You should leave,” Dean declared.

Perlez looked at his colleague, amazed. His voice started to crack as he spoke. “I can’t leave you in this state. It isn’t right.”

“Why not? I’ve made all my preparations. Everything taken care of. All that I have left to do is pass the time.”

“Everything?” Perlez felt himself helpless for a moment, lost in the fact that this had been occurring all along while he had been ignorant of what was happening.

Dean looked down at his bowl, which was clean and empty. “There is one thing, I was hoping....”

His voice trailed off for a moment. The thought seemed to strain him. “Can you ask them to erase our names?”

“What? Who?”

“Whoever writes these things, whoever keeps the records,” Dean said dismissively. “I don’t know. I just want my name to be wiped out from the record.”

“They can’t just make us not exist.”

Dean sighed. “I know. I know they can’t pretend we never left. I know we can’t ask the whole world to forget that, but still....” Dean’s voice was quiet. “I just want to be forgotten. They can talk about two men that went back. They can talk about what we did. I just want my name erased. I want them to forget I ever existed.”

Perlez stared down at his colleague, who would not meet his eyes. Dean just gazed into the empty bowl, and Perlez wondered if the man could still eat, and had simply grown weary of it, had simply decided to cease existing. But that didn’t make sense. And the request, cruel as it was, did make sense.

“I will,” Perlez said. “I’ll write it down and put it in the capsule.”

Dean looked up and his face slowly contorted into a smile, lips held tightly shut, eyes cloudy but not raining. “Thank you.”

“Let them forget,” Perlez said with an air of bravura that sounded false to him, even though Dean seemed to appreciate it.

The two men shook hands and Perlez left, not quite understanding what was happening. It seemed to him that Dean was choosing death and oblivion, not simply succumbing to them, but actively choosing these things that you spend your lifetime running away from, only to come full circle in the end and fall down exhausted in their arms anyway. If this was not suicide, then what was it?

But the more he thought about it, the more he felt unable to deny the request. Ultimately, he was powerless over what the future did with them, but he had to make the request. In fact, he could feel the same temptation that Dean must surely be feeling--to become a person outside of history, with no past and no future, just a moment that exists and is perceived and experienced and then gone.

And so the second report contains Perlez’s request on the behalf of Dean, that the future erase all record of their births, their deaths, their names, their entire lives. Dean’s parents might have had three children once, a boy and two girls. Now, whoever they are, they have two children. Sometimes, if someone asks Dean’s mother if she wishes she had a son, her eyes grow wet and she doesn’t know what to say, and the person asking the question changes the subject awkwardly, not really understanding what he said or did to provoke such a response.

Of course, the memories of those who knew Dean and Perlez cannot be erased. But all written record of their lives has been destroyed. The collective memory of both men has been destroyed, leaving only private memories, which shall die soon enough. The names, reader, are my own creation, for the simplicity of telling the tale, and that is all. Whatever the real names might be, it seems that they have been successfully erased. I could find no record of them, and I did search quite hard.

All we have left of Perlez and Dean are their reports, which form an incomplete history of their lives. But they can no longer be connected with their own lives. Whoever they are, they have been set free from their own story. Sadly, their actions (and the consequences of these actions) cannot be erased, but they have been granted immunity. Perhaps Dean decided they had suffered enough for their failure. I see no reason to argue the point.

The reader may rightly wonder what happened to the two men? Obviously, the story is incomplete and must remain that way. We do know that Dean died at some point in 1930, not long after the aforementioned encounter between him and Perlez. Apparently, Perlez did not see him again after he left the cottage.

The second report seems to have been written shortly after Dean’s death. The cottage and all of Dean’s worldly wealth was left to Perlez, who writes that he moved in with some hesitation, not wanting to take the place of a dead man. A natural response, but the pragmatic concerns of his own poverty overrode such petty superstitions.

There is little in the final pages of the second report that elaborate on Perlez’s mental state in the aftermath of Dean’s death. Was he gripped by despair at being finally and completely alone in his time? Or did he feel a sense of relief at the prospect of being unknown, a stranger who no one would ever know the truth about? Surely, there is a sense of freedom, even as there is sadness, in Perlez’s position at this point.

Nor do we know how long he lived. Did he see the rise of Hitler? The beginning of the Second World War? The concentration camps? Did he smile and nod knowingly throughout all the conversations, biting his tongue? It is hard to imagine how he or anyone could tolerate such a life. To live powerless before that terror is horrible, but how awful to experience it as Perlez surely must have--as the direct consequence of your life.

The second report ends with regret; Perlez was undoubtedly aware of the deprivations that would come to him if he lived long enough. He writes, “I often speculate why someone did not go to the spot where capsule was supposed to be buried once the mission had been approved to go ahead. Surely there must have been a curious soul eager to see the results of the mission before it began? Children still find their Christmas presents before Christmas morning. Curiosity is not dead.

“Maybe we were simply blind. Or maybe we knew what we would find and so we simply ignored it, just for the sake of allowing ourselves the opportunity to knowingly fly headlong into failure and then act surprised afterwards, as if we never expected that wall to be there. We knew it all along. Someone out there must be reading these words now, seeing my face on the news as I talk blithely about our good intentions and the braveness of this experiment. Whoever you are, why didn’t you try to stop me? What froze you in your place? That is the question I ask myself. That is the question that destroys me.

“Is it too much to wish that someone had grabbed me by the collar and shouted in my face, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go?”

Reader, I hope you will take these words to heart.

I realize you cannot take this story at face value. How could anyone? Obviously, the story cannot be entirely accurate, given the complications of its subject matter and the large gaps in the source material. I have done my best, but I regret there have been omissions. In many cases, my own speculations had to fill the gap, although I feel my imagination stayed truer to events than mere reality ever could.

When I began, I said this was not a warning, and I stand by those words. This was not intended to simply cause alarm. All I wanted to do was spread this knowledge and hope that it might somehow pass around until finally finding a brain in which it could take root. I do agree with Perlez--there must have been someone who read the contents of the capsule before he and Dean left for the past, and that person must have chosen to remain silent. I hope this knowledge passes through the years and reaches a mouth that can speak at the right time.

Of course, I doubt that is the case. If someone did stop the mission, then these words would not exist; in writing them, I only confirm that I am failure too. And yet I write, just as Perlez pleaded for someone to tell him to stay behind. And like Perlez and Dean, I stand now outside of time, outside of history. I, like them, have walked off the page, if only to better see the book itself.

I think I understand why the person who read the capsule did not act. How could they possibly act in such a situation? Having read the contents of the capsule, they knew that the mission did go forward, and they did nothing to prevent it. What an awful form of self-knowledge, to understand that you fail your life by living it.

But how can you live your life like that, frozen by a knowledge that you cannot change the future or the past? Perlez and Dean had to go back into the past. I had to write these words. You had to read them. But I hope, dear reader, you shall do me the courtesy of acting surprised. In this mess of time we have created, that may be the only human decency left between us.