The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(31)

A moment, a second when the ripples went out of the drink in her hand, perfect stillness as Virginia tried to remember a thing she had chosen to forget.

“There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost,” she explained at last. “Personally, I feel a great sense of relief. You wipe away the scars of your former life as well as the memories. You wipe away the guilt. I do not say that I have lived a guilty life, of course; merely that the silence of my peers when I ask about the subject does not bode well for the things I cannot remember.”

A tick tick tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Soon sirens would sound, and stop, and the city would listen for the low drone of the bombers, the deep clearing of death’s throat as he prepared to sing.

“The second death,” she went on, “is the death of not being born. It is really rather controversial among us, for it throws into doubt all the scientific theories currently extant about our very natures. It has been observed that if a kalachakra is aborted before consciousness in one life, then in the next the child will not be born at all. It is the true death, the destruction of both mind and body, and, unlike the Forgetting, there is no coming back from it, no healing of mental pathways. It is simply the end. So you see, dearest Harry, there is nothing so prized by our kind as this–who you truly are, who your parents were, and your place and time of birth. This information can destroy you utterly. And one day you might want to be destroyed, of course. Or to forget. The mind struggles to re-create the joy of a first kiss, but somehow manages to recall the terror of pain, the flush of humiliation and the burden of guilt with a startling clarity.”

Franklin Phearson.

I’m a good guy, Harry. I’m a f*cking good guy.

My skin was white above the bone where it gripped the brandy glass.

Looking back, I ask myself who precisely knows the circumstances of my birth. Even in terms of those who live purely linear lives, the numbers are very few: my father, my adopted parents, my aunts, my grandmother Constance and perhaps some relatives on my mother’s side who suspected but could not precisely name my origins. These were unavoidable weaknesses, established before I was born, but my bastardy afforded me great protection. No official records exist of my birth or origin until I am at least seven or eight, when an overzealous school monitor notes a gap in her records, and by then I am in a position to expunge the record as soon as it is made. The shame of being illegitimate in the 1920s, especially to a family whose values lingered from an earlier age, kept discussion of my parentage limited to a tight circle and, once the key players were dead, there was no reason for my origins to be advertised at all unless I chose to. In childhood I am blessed by being rather stunted until I am a teen, and then experiencing a rapid growth spurt rather late–it confuses any guesses as to the precise date of my birth. In adulthood my father’s overbred features seem to grow confused as they mingle with my mother’s genes, so I can appear to be convincingly twenty-two or thirty-nine at any given moment, as long as I choose my clothes carefully. My hair turns white almost overnight, but stress can alter my physiology, so again the exact date of my birth is hard to guess in later years; and extensive travel has so corrupted my accent that now I find I have almost none of my own, but rather adapt at once to whatever the local requirements appear to be with an ease that borders on the sycophantic. In short, the disadvantages of my normal life, if we are to call it that, are blessings for my secret being, and even as Virginia recounted the final days of Victor Hoeness, I sat back in my chair and considered all this with a growing sense of security.

“Now Victor,” she explained, “really rather buggered things up for the future generations. Whole generations of kalachakra simply were not born, and being not born kalachakra once, they were not born again. The world continued as it always had been, Victor’s experiment having been terminally ended by death, but the cries for vengeance came whispering down from those few lucky ones who had survived the future apocalypse, telling of whole Clubs wiped out, thousands of years of history and culture which must now be rebuilt from the ground upwards. Not to mention, of course, the rather premature destruction of the world for everyone else on it, but they really didn’t count in the scheme of things.”

I didn’t question this world view, nor why should I? Victor Hoeness had unleashed four hundred years of war and suffering on the world and then he’d died, and none of it had mattered, for when he was born again, things were as they had always been. I was in the Cronus Club now, the past and the future a few whispers away, the secrets of my very existence, I felt, within my grasp. These words were merely stories.

“Those were cruder times,” Virginia explained. “There wasn’t any room for niceties.”

And it was in this spirit that Victor Hoeness was tracked down in the city of Linz, aged eleven years old, where he was already preparing for another stab at changing the nature of the universe. He was taken from his home and tortured for eleven days. On the twelfth he broke and confessed to his true place of birth, parents, home, point of origin. He was kept captive while painstaking research was made into the veracity of his story and, when it was found to be true, the Cronus Club assembled to decide what to do with him.

“Cruder times, cruder times!” exclaimed Virginia.

What they decided was that merely killing Victor outright was not enough. Death, as has been established, holds little fear–it is but the flesh. The mind is the source of what we are, and it was the mind that they were determined to destroy.