The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (22 page)

One day.

One day to avoid a fate far, far worse than death.

One day in a padded suit strapped to a padded chair in a padded room.

Look for the flaws in the system, any flaw, no matter what.

Chair bolted to the floor, IV drip feeding me the nutrients I would naturally refuse to take. Padded door, guards outside. They were the weakest link. Vincent, in refusing to participate in what would happen next, had left the process open and exposed to manipulation. I had no doubt that he’d ordered the guards not to speak to me, but sometimes even an under-rewarded soldier of the USSR has to take the initiative.

I tugged and writhed against the needle in my hand until at last I managed to pull it free, lacerating the skin across the top of my hand in a great jagged red stripe. I didn’t call out, didn’t say anything, but let the blood run in great crimson stains over the white padded floor, infusing the cloth with glorious technicolour. The strap across my skull made it impossible for my head to hang, but I closed my eyes and waited with what I hoped was my greatest
faraway look. It took the guards shamefully long to check on me and see the blood still dribbling down the chair. They burst in at once, and then an embarrassing conversation took place as to what they should do, and whether to get help.

“Is he unconscious?” asked one. “How much blood has he lost?”

The elder and, I hoped, the senior, inspected my hand. “It’s a surface wound,” he exclaimed. “He’s pulled out the needle.”

I opened my eyes and was satisfied to see the man jump back in alarm. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I imagine you’re under orders not to communicate with me, so let me be blunt and to the purpose. I know you all, I know your names, your ranks, your histories and your homes. I know that you, Private, still live with your mother and you, Sergeant, have a wife in Moscow who you haven’t seen for three and a half years, and a daughter whose photo you proudly carry in your pocket and show to all in the canteen every dinner break without fail. ‘She is my diamond,’ you explain. ‘She is my wealth.’ I have a question for you–just one question, and it’s this–do they know nothing? Absolutely nothing about what you do? It’s very important you think about this, very important you consider every aspect of every conversation you’ve ever had with them, for if they know anything, anything at all which could compromise this facility, then of course, gentlemen, they will be next. Your wife, your mother, your daughter–they cannot know a thing. Not even a whisper. That’s all I wished to say, and now if you wouldn’t mind applying a plaster to my hand, I’ll get on with the business of awaiting my torture and inevitable execution, thank you.”

They left in a hurry and didn’t bring me a plaster.

It may have been twenty hours later, it may have been two, and Vincent was back. The sergeant from before stood in the doorway as he talked, watching me nervously over his employer’s shoulder.

“Have you considered?” Vincent asked urgently. “Have you decided?”

“Of course I have,” I replied lightly. “You’re going to torture
me, and I’m going to tell you an endless series of whatever it is I think you want to hear, to make you stop.”

“Harry,” urgency, desperate and low in his voice, “it doesn’t have to be this way. Tell me your point of origin and no harm will come to you, I swear.”

“Have you considered the point of no return? That moment when the damage you’ve done to my body is so great that I no longer care, nor consider it worth my while, to say anything at all? You must be hoping that you won’t reach that moment before you break my mind.”

He leaned back, face hardening at my words. “This is your doing, Harry. This is something you’re doing to yourself.”

So saying, he left me. The sergeant stayed in the door, and for a moment our eyes locked.

“Nothing at all?” I asked as the door swung shut.

They began only a few minutes later. To my surprise, they opened with chemicals and a twist on the usual theme of the same, a partial paralytic, locking my diaphragm in place so I choked and suffocated, the air turning to lead in my lungs, blood and head. Some movement was still possible, the dose cleverly judged, so for an hour, maybe more, maybe less, I sat gasping and gaping for air, the sweat running down my face and spine, vision on the edge of darkness but not quite going over. Vincent had hired a professional. A small man with a neat moustache, he had his tools laid out–always for my scrutiny–on a tray before him, and like an athlete in training gave some time for rest between each new application of pain. At the end of every rest he asked the question “What is your point of origin?” and waited patiently for me to reply, shaking his head sadly when I refused to do so. Next up was physical nausea, causing cries not so much of pain but of an animal trapped in its own carcass, of heat upon heat upon heat, of a twisting, a shrinking, a narrowing of the senses until all I could perceive was my own hideously sane delirium.

And there was the sergeant in the door, watching, always watching, and when the torturer took a break to get himself a glass of
water, the sergeant came in and took my pulse, looked into the pupils of my eyes and whispered,

“She knows I took the train to Ploskye Prydy, the end of the line. Is that too much?”

I just smiled at him and let him answer the question for himself.

Somewhere between the sickness and the suffocation Vincent came in and held my hand. “I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I tried to spit at him, but my mouth was dry, and he left again.

They brought in the car battery long before, I think, they intended to use it. It was merely another object of interest, a thing to be placed on display. Sleep deprivation and extreme heat, a variation on the method I had expected, were the first order of the day. Someone with a highly creative appreciation of the use of surround sound and an ear for the unholy had created a soundtrack which oscillated between techno beats, tortured screams and graphic descriptions of violent and violating acts, carried on with Foley effects and in several different languages. If there was any danger that the noise and horror of all this was making me numb, a little too close to sleep, the guards came in and shook me awake, throwing ice water in my face, horror against the heat.

“You’re a good man,” I told the sergeant when he woke me again. “You know what’s right.”

“Drink, Harry, drink.” Vincent’s voice, a whisper in the sudden quiet. I knew he put a damp cloth to my lips and I drank greedily, until my mind crawled back to awareness and I spat the liquid out, spilling it down my chin and front, a thin concoction two parts saliva to one part water. The torturer’s moustache was especially fine the day he pulled my toenails out. I imagined him sleeping at night with a net across his face to give it such excellent buoyancy.

“You’re a good man,” I told the sergeant as he folded up the plastic sheet from beneath my feet, containing its cocktail of torn nail and black blood. “How long until it’s you?”

He looked over his shoulder to make sure the torturer was outside, taking one of his many rest breaks to stretch his fingers out after his work, then leaned in close. “I can get you poison,” he whispered. He looked. “That’s all I can do.”

“That’s enough,” I replied. “That’s all anyone can do.”

The poison was rat poison, but rats and humans share more than a few passing genetic traits. It was enough. The torturer, ironically, didn’t realise what my symptoms entailed until my kidneys were well into failure; even I could perceive the spreading yellowness in my skin was no reaction to having the little bones in my feet crushed one at a time in a vice. I howled with laughter when the torturer realised, shaking in my chair, stained tears rolling down my cheeks at the revelation.

“You idiot!” I shrieked. “You incompetent! You total arse!”

They unstrapped me from the chair and the torturer stuck two fingers down my throat to induce vomiting far, far too late. That was how Vincent found me, on the floor, shaking with laughter in my own blood-flecked puke. The old sergeant stood stiff and steady in the door. Vincent turned from me to the torturer, to the sergeant, and in that instant knew precisely what had happened and how. Anger flickered across his face, and he turned back to me. I laughed the harder to see the look in his eye, but to my surprise Vincent didn’t lash out at the sergeant, didn’t condemn the torturer, but gestured to two orderlies and barked, “Get him to the infirmary.”

They got me to the infirmary.

They even gave me painkillers.

The doctor stared at the floor as she delivered her diagnosis, and my laughter, rather diminished by the loss of hormonal stimulation from my system, was only a smile for Vincent when he came to my bedside. “That was very quick,” he said at last. “I didn’t expect you to contrive a means of death for at least five days.”

“It’s been less than five days?”

“Two and a half.”

“Good God.” Then, “The sergeant’s a good man. He didn’t like
what you’re doing. If you shoot him, can you apologise to him first? On my behalf, that is.”

Vincent scowled, flicking through my medical chart in the vain hope of finding some indication that I wasn’t, in fact, already a long way past saving. I had finished puking, finished shaking and burning. The doctors had got to me in time to prevent cardiac failure, but my kidneys were lost, and my liver would follow soon, and that was enough. I didn’t even need to look at a chart to know it was so.

“He’ll be moved to another unit,” replied Vincent calmly. “I am not in the business of unnecessary death.” I nearly laughed again, but breathing was on the way out, so I only managed a grunt. “It’s obvious now that I won’t get what I want, so of course we’ll aim to make your death as comfortable as possible. Is there anything I can bring you?”

“Wouldn’t say no to more morphine.”

“Alas, I believe you’re already at your maximum allowance.”

“What’s the harm now?” His lips twitched, eyes dancing away. My heart jumped a beat. What more? What more could possibly be done to me in the little time I had left? “Vincent,” I murmured, voice slipping low with warning, questioning, “what are you going to do?”

“I am sorry, Harry.”

“So you keep saying, and I’m sure every toenail I left behind is grateful for your pity. What are you planning?”

He didn’t meet my eye as he said, “I need you to forget.”

I was so briefly stunned, I didn’t know what to say. He half-shook his head, and for a moment I wondered if he was going to apologise again. The temptation to try and punch him if he did flickered briefly at the back of my mind, not that I could have possibly landed a blow. Instead, he just walked away and refused to look back even when I started screaming again.

They kept me tranquillised for most of my demise, which was a relief. It kept both the pain, and the thoughts of what was next, subdued. I know I dreamed but, for almost the first time, did not
remember my dreams, only that they were fast and hot, reality intruding into the stories of my mind as a prickling on my skin that became the claws of insects, a burning in my stomach that became the carrying of my own guts in a shopping bag, the bleeding in my feet which was simply explained by my wandering mind as the slow swallowing of my body whole by a great snake whose body rippled like a harmonic wave with each new gulp of my flesh. By the time its fangs reached my midriff, my feet were already well into the snake’s belly, dissolving a bone at a time in the slow pulsing acid.

They cut things fine. I was on pure oxygen and my stats still falling by the time they were ready for me. They wheeled in a new device, patched together from who-knew-what dregs of a mad scientist’s mind. It needed its own power supply–a mere two hundred and thirty volts were not enough for this baby. There was some bickering about whether the trolley I lay on should be earthed or not, before one doctor with a great bark of “You’re such children!” pointed out that the metal handcuffs which strapped me to its sides would do a perfectly decent task of channelling any current and that everyone was to treat this procedure as being equivalent to a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and be it on their own head if they got stung.

I believe I kicked and screamed and begged and fought, but in truth I was probably too tired and too dosed to make more than grunting noises punctuated by the occasional child-like shriek of indignation. They had to use masking tape to attach the electrodes to my skull; getting me to keep the final electrode in my mouth proved more of a challenge until the same doctor who had demonstrated such a sensible attitude to voltage reached the equally sensible decision to administer a paralytic. Sedation, it was judged, would probably not help what they were aiming to achieve, but I was grateful when one of the orderlies leaned over and taped my frozen bone-dry eyes shut. All I was left with was sound. It took them three false starts to get it right, the first charge misfiring as a fuse blew; the second failing to trigger because one of the leads had become detached in the attempt to change the
fuse. When they finally got round to the business of sending a few thousand volts through my brain in an attempt to wipe every aspect of who and what I was from my still-thinking mind, it had a slight air of comedic afterthought.

I heard the doctor say, “Can we please get it right this time? Is everyone standing clear? All right, and—”

And that was that.

I’ve only once attended a Forgetting.

It was 1989, in a private room of St Nicolas’ Hospital, Chicago. I was seventy years old and doing all right for myself, I felt. I had only received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma a few months ago, which was surprisingly late in my life cycle, and my enthusiasm in my mid-sixties for how little I appeared to be dying a slow and inconvenient death had led to me taking better care of my body than I usually did. I was even a member of a tennis club, something I’d never been in all my lives gone before, and I taught mathematics at a school in the mountains of Morocco for three months of every year, perhaps in an attempt to enjoy the company of the children that I could never call my own.

My visit to this eminently polite room in this eminently polite hospital on the edge of a more polite Chicago suburb, where the American flag flew proud and fresh flowers were put at the end of every patient’s bed, every day, without fail, was not on my own account. I had been summoned, and the woman who had summoned me was dying.

Akinleye.

I hadn’t seen her since that night in Hong Kong when her maid
danced out across the water and she had fled before the sun rose.

They had me put on a sterile robe, and wash my hands in alcohol before going into her room, but the measure was rather half-hearted. The damage had already been done. How a woman with so few white blood cells left in her body was still alive bewildered me, and stepping through the door into the room where she would soon be deceased, I could see how obviously, how clearly, death approached.

Her hair had fallen out, leaving a pocked skull of crude bones protruding up like mismatched tectonic plates. I hadn’t ever seen her without any hair before, but now I realised how egg-shaped her skull truly was. To say her eyes had sunk into her sockets would be a lie, rather it was that every ounce of flesh, every line of softness in her features had been eroded away, leaving no more than a skull thinly coated in muscle and protruding remnants of nose, ear, lip, eye dangling off it like baubles off a withered Christmas tree. She was physically younger than I, but in that place, at that time, I was the sprightly infant, she the ancient one, dying alone.

“Harry,” she wheezed, and it didn’t take a doctor’s training to notice the crackle in her voice, the holes in her breath. “Took your time.” I pulled up the empty chair by her bed, sat down carefully, bones creaking a little despite my exercises. “You look good,” she added. “Old age suits you.”

I grunted in reply, the only sound I felt was really apt. “How are you, Akinleye? They wouldn’t tell me much outside.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “they don’t know what to say. It’s a race as to what will kill me off first. My immune system, you know. And before you tell me that AIDS is a lifestyle disease, I think you should know that you’re an idiot.”

“I wasn’t going to say—”

“The others look at me, you know, as if I was evil. As if having this–” she may have wanted to gesture, but the movement was little more than a twitch at the end of her fingertips “–is somehow a result of being morally bankrupt. Instead of the fucking cheap condom splitting.”

“You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Am I? Maybe I am. You’re all right, Harry, always have been. Stodgy old fart but all right.”

“How long have you got?” I asked.

“My money’s on the pneumonia getting me–couple of days, maybe? A week if I’m unlucky.”

“I’ll stay. I’m booked into a hotel down the road…”

“Fuck’s sake, Harry, I don’t want your pity. It’s just dying!”

“Then why did you call me?”

She spoke fast and flatly, words that she had already prepared. “I want to forget.”

“Forget? Forget what?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“I don’t—”

“Harry, don’t be obtuse. You do it sometimes to put people at ease, but I find it patronising and annoying. You know exactly what I mean. You try so hard to blend in, I find it frankly intrusive. Why do you do that?”

“Did you ask me here to tell me that?”

“No,” she replied, shuffling her weight a little in the bed. “Although now you’re here, I may as well inform you that this ridiculous notion you have that if people find you pleasant, you’ll have a pleasant time in return is stupid and naïve. For fuck’s sake, Harry, what did the world do to you to make you so… blank?”

“I can go…”

“Stay. I need you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re so obliging,” she replied with a sigh. “Because you’re so blank. I need that now. I need to forget.”

I leaned forward in my seat, fingertips steepling together. “Would you like someone to talk you out of it?” I said at last.

“Absolutely not.”

“Nevertheless, I feel a certain obligation to try.”

“For God’s sake, as if you could say anything to me I haven’t already said to myself.”

I put my head on one side, flicked at the seam of my hospital
robe, ran my nails down either side of the line, tightening it to a ridge along my sleeve. Then, “I told my wife.”

“Which one?”

“My first wife. The first woman I married. Jenny. She was linear and I was not, and I told her, and she left me. And a man came, and he wanted to know the future, and he wasn’t very polite when I said no, and I wanted to die, the true death, the blackness that stops the dark. That’s why, in answer to your question. Why I… go along with things. Because nothing else I’ve done seems to work.”

She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling it beneath her teeth. Then, “Silly man. As if anyone else has got the right idea.”

The Forgetting. It merits, I believe, a definite article in front of the name, for it is a kind of death. I told Akinleye all the things which she already knew in an attempt to dissuade her. A death of the mind, for us, exceeds a death of the body. There would be pain. There would be fear. And even if she did not feel the loss of knowledge, of mind, of soul which the Forgetting brings, even if she did not regret its absence, having no recollection of what was gone, we who knew her, who were her friends, would be bitterly sorrowful to see her go, though her body lived on. I did not add the last part of my argument, that to forget was to run away. To abscond from the responsibility of the things she’d done and who she’d been. I did not think the notion would hold much sway.

To which she said, “Harry, you’re a nice man trying to do your best here, but you and I both know I have seen and done such things as I would not live with any more. I have shut down my heart, cut off what you so charmingly call my soul, because I find that I cannot live with either of them. Do this for me, Harry, and maybe I can have them back again.”

I didn’t push the argument any further. My heart wasn’t in it.

The following morning I went to the Chicago Cronus Club to collect what I needed, and I left a letter to be distributed to the other Clubs informing them that Akinleye would no longer remember who and what we were, and in her new, innocent state,
we should watch over her, and only interfere once she had need of our help.

The technology of 1987 was only a little beyond that which Vincent used to wipe my mind. He had the advantage of some foreknowledge; the Cronus Club had the advantage of plenty. We may not tamper much in temporal events, but when it comes to matters of our own survival, the Clubs of the future share their knowledge with the Clubs of the past. I have even heard rumours of a steam-powered device deployed in the 1870s to aid with the Forgetting of its maker, though I have no proof to corroborate this claim, nor probably ever shall have.

Our device was a mixture of chemical and electrical, nodes targeting some very specific portions of the brain. Unlike Vincent’s, our device did not require the mind to be conscious for the moment, and as I administered the final sedative into Akinleye’s bloodstream, it felt like a kind of murder.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “In a few lives, when I’ve settled down a bit, come visit me, OK?”

I promised that I would, but she had already closed her eyes.

The process only took a few seconds after that. I stayed with her when it was done, monitoring her vitals, sitting by the bedside. She’d been right–the pneumonia was going to win the battle of diseases trying to kill her off. Under other circumstances, I would have simply let her die, but the Forgetting had one other, vital step, essential to seeing if it was complete. It happened three nights after the initial shock had been delivered, at two thirty in the morning. I woke to the sound of a voice crying out. It took me a while to recognise the language–Ewe, a dialect I hadn’t heard spoken for centuries. My knowledge of Ewe was middling at best, but I had enough to reach out and take Akinleye’s hand and whisper, “Peace. You’re safe.”

If she understood my words, she showed no sign but recoiled at the sight of me and called out again in Ewe for her parents, for her family, for someone to help her. She didn’t understand what was happening, looked down at her body and shuddered with pain. Mother, father, God were all begged for assistance.

“I am Harry,” I said. “Do you know me?”

“I do not know you!” she wheezed. “Help me! What is happening?”

“You’re in hospital. You’re ill.” I wished my knowledge of the language was better than it was, for the only way I could think of to phrase it was “dying”.

“Who am I?”

“You’ll find out.”

“I’m scared!”

“I know,” I murmured. “That’s how you know it worked.”

I put her back to sleep before she could ask anything more. As a child, born again, she might perhaps remember this encounter, and consider it a dream, but there was no need to give her anything more material than was absolutely necessary. When the nurses came in the next morning to change Akinleye’s sheets, she was dead and I was gone.