The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(103)

“All right then,” she said calmly. “That’s all right, then.”

And that, it seemed, was all there was to say.


In 1985 I began to experience pain, heaviness in my legs, and after a few weeks of ignoring it, decided to trot off to the doctor for my usual diagnosis of multiple myeloma. The doctor earned my respect for the skill with which she gave the information to me, unfolding it in several careful diagnostic stages, first with abnormalities which might be, then with masses which appeared to be, and finally, having primed the patient for receipt of the dire news through rounds one and two, with the calm statement that it was, and I should be prepared for a difficult fight. I was so touched by the manner in which she handled this last, crucial phase that at the end of it I stood up and shook her by the hand, complimenting her on her grace and skill. She flushed and mumbled me out of the door with far less verbal poise than that with which she’d informed me I was dying.

Vincent, when he received the news, was outraged. “We must do something! What do you need, Harry? How can I help? I’ll make a call to Johns Hopkins at once–I’m sure I’ve bought them a ward or something recently…”

“No, thank you.”

“Nonsense, I insist.”

He insisted.

Wearily, I went through the motions.

As I lay in a white hospital gown designed to institutionalise any free-spirited individual as quickly as possible, listening to electromagnets power up around my body, I considered my next step. Certainly I had made progress in this life–I had observed the way Vincent worked, studied his contacts, his methods, his people, and, most important of all, I had convinced him that I was utterly harmless. From a man he’d had killed only a few lives ago, I was now his trusted assistant, confidant and friend.

I was not, however, yet privy to the vital information that I truly required to bring Vincent down and stop the quantum mirror being manufactured, and I either had to endure many long years of questionable medical procedures while trying to find out, or I would die and an opportunity would be missed.

This being so, I resolved to gamble, the most dangerous gamble of my lives.


“I’m not taking the chemo.”

1986. We were on the balcony of one of Vincent’s many New York apartments, Central Park to the south, the lights of Manhattan beyond, a sky flecked with grey-brown clouds. The air at street level in New York was getting difficult to breathe, as it had become in most big cities. Too many bright ideas had happened too fast–too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many freezers, too many mobile phones, too many TVs, too many microwaves–and not enough time to consider the consequences. Now New York belched brown sludge into the skies and green slime into the waters around the island, and so it was with the rest of the earth.

The world is ending.

We cannot stop it.

“I’m not taking the chemo,” I repeated a little louder, as Vincent stirred lemon peel at the bottom of a glass.

“Don’t be ridiculous Harry,” he blurted. “Of course you’ve got to do the chemo, of course!”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

He sat down on the recliner next to mine, setting the two glasses–one for him, one for me–on the low metal table between us. He looked up at the sky and, taking his time, said, “Why?”

“Chemotherapy is a prison sentence. It is six months of house arrest, of nausea without being able to vomit, of a heady heat without being able to find a deep enough cold, of pain with no remedy, of isolation and discomfort, and at the end of it I will still be here, and I will still be dying.”

“You can’t know that!”

“I can,” I replied firmly. “I do. I will.”

“But Harry—”

“I know it,” I repeated. “I give you my word–I know it.”

Silence a while. He was waiting perhaps. I took a deep breath and got it out of the way. I had told so few people my secret–no one since the attack on the Cronus Club–the fear and nervousness I experienced were genuine and probably only helped.

“What would you say if I told you that this is not the first time I have had this disease?”

“I’d say what the hell do you mean, old thing?”

“I’ve been through this once before,” I replied. “I had chemotherapy, radiotherapy, drugs–everything–but developed metastases in my brain.”

“Jesus, Harry! What happened to you?”

“It’s simple,” I replied. “I died.”

Silence.

The traffic grumbled below; the clouds scudded above. I sat and could almost hear Vincent’s brain considering where to go. I let him do his own thinking. It would be informative to see where he came down.

“Harry,” he said at last, “do you know of a thing called the Cronus Club?”

“No. Listen. What I’m trying to tell you—”

“You’re telling me that you have lived this life before,” he said, voice deep and weary. “You were born an orphan and you lived and you died, and when you were born again, you were still you, precisely where you started. That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”

My turn to be silent.

My turn to think.

I let it stretch and stretch and stretch between us. Then, “How? Tell me how. Please?”