The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  He seemed very indignant on the subject so once again, I said, “Yes.”

  His eyebrows waggled furiously. He had an uncanny knack of talking with his eyebrows and chin, while the rest of him remained to a good degree static. “Then why did you waste fifteen pages of your last paper discussing the ethical implications of a quantum theory?!”

  I sipped my drink and waited for the eyebrows to descend to their natural–but not absolute–state of rest. “Your name,” I said at last, “is Vincent Rankis, and I am only aware of this fact because when the beadle challenged you for cutting the corner of the grass you gave him this same name while informing him that in this changing society his role would soon be not merely redundant, but mocked by the imminently approaching future generations. You were wearing that very same olive shirt, if I recall, and I—”

  “Blue shirt, grey socks, dress robe, heading at high speed towards the gate in a manner which I can only assume meant you were late for a lecture, it being five minutes to the hour and most of your lectures occurring more than ten minutes away.”

  I looked at Vincent once again, and this time made conscious note of all the characteristics I had already unconsciously perceived. Then, “Very well, Vincent, let’s discuss ethical musings and the scientific method—”

  “One is subjective, the other valid.”

  “If your view is so absolute, I hardly see what good my view will serve.”

  A flicker of a smile occurred in the corner of his mouth, and he had the grace to look, briefly, ashamed. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I may have had a little something to drink on my way over here. I know I can come across as… firm.”

  “A man travels back in time…” I began, and at Vincent’s immediate flinch of distaste I raised my hand and said placatingly, “Hypothetically speaking, a thought experiment if you like. A man travels back in time and sees the events of the past unfolding like a future before his eyes. He steps out of his time machine–”

  “Immediately altering the past!”

  “–and his very first act is to post his younger self the winning riders at Newmarket. Result?”

  “Paradox,” declared Vincent firmly. “He has no memory of having been posted these numbers; he never won at Newmarket. If he had, he may not have built the time machine and gone back in time to post the numbers to himself to begin with–logical impossibility.”

  “Result?”

  “Impossibility!”

  “Indulge the hypothesis.”

  He huffed furiously, then exclaimed, “Three possible outcomes! One: at the very instant that he makes the decision to send himself the winning numbers, he remembers receiving them and his personal timeline changes, thus he self-perpetuates his own existence as without the winning numbers he could not have built his time machine. Paradox within that being that nothing can come from nothing, and his initiative, his causal event, is in fact an effect, effect preceding cause, but I don’t suppose we’re dealing with logic in this scenario. Two: the whole universe collapses. Rather melodramatic, I know, but if we consider time as a scalar concept with no negative value then I really see no other way, which seems a shame if all we’re discussing here is a little bet at Newmarket. Three: at the very instant he makes the decision to send himself the numbers, a parallel universe is created. In his universe, his linear timeline, he returns home having not won anything at Newmarket in his life, while in a parallel universe his younger self is rather surprised to discover that he’s a millionaire and carries on quite happily thank you. Implications?”

  “I have no idea,” I replied brightly. “I merely wished to see if you were capable of lateral thinking.”

  He gave another great huff of exasperation and stared fuming into the fire. Then, “I enjoyed your paper. Ignoring the wishy-washy, namby-pamby philosophical stuff, which, I personally thought, verged on the almost theological, I thought your paper was marginally more interesting than the usual journal matter. That’s what I wished to say.”

  “I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”

  “Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”

  “Would you shoot Hitler?” I asked.

  He scowled. “I thought we had just determined a likelihood of the universe being destroyed by such temporal tampering.”

  “We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war,” I replied. “We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.”

  He drummed his fingers along the edge of his chair then blurted, “There are socio-economic forces that must be considered too. Was Hitler the sole cause of war? I would argue no.”

  “But the direction the war took…?”

  “But there’s the thing!” he exclaimed, the eyebrows back into full swing. “If I make the decision to shoot Hitler, how do I not know that someone less willing to fight in Russia in the dead of winter, or to besiege cities with minimal strategic value at the cost of hundreds of thousands of men, or start bombing London and not her airfields–how do I know that this other, saner warmonger will not emerge from the conditions already in place?”

  “You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”

  “I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”

  He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a drink?” I asked at last.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Scotch.”

  “I’ve already had a bit much…”

  “I won’t tell the beadle.”

  A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”

  I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what brings you to our hallowed halls?”

  “Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is? An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”

  “And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”

  He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re up for a professorship.”

  “I won’t get it.”

  “Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be just.”

  “Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

  “You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”

  “You’re right, it is irrational. You seem very… forthright… for an undergraduate.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t waste time with being young, there’s far too much to do which society will not permit to the under-thirties.”

  His words produced an instant and inevitable tug within me; I had spent twenty-five tedious years living them. “You’re interested in time?”

  “Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple lang
uage to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.”

  So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.

  Chapter 18

  Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

  I should have screamed it at Phearson, should have nailed his ears to the Clubhouse door and made him listen to the stories of disaster and mayhem unleashed down the generations recorded at the Cronus Club. As it was, I could not have known just how accurate my assessment of his tampering could be; nor predicted how far he would go to get more answers from me than I considered it safe to give.

  When, in that fourth life, Phearson and his men finally tortured me for my knowledge of things to come, they began uncertainly. They were perfectly prepared to use extreme violence to obtain their results, but they were afraid of damaging the goods in question. I was unique, a once-in-a-lifetime catch, my potential still unknown and unexplored, and to inflict any permanent physical, or worse mental, damage would be an unforgivable sin. Realising this, I screamed the louder, and coughed and foamed and writhed in my own piss and blood. They were so alarmed by this that, briefly, they backed off until Phearson came close again and whispered, “We’re doing this for the world, Harry. We’re doing this for the future.”

  Then they started again.

  At the end of the second day, they dragged me into the shower and turned it on cold. I sat in the tray while they ran the water over me, and wondered if the glass shower screen could be broken with a punch, and how long it would take me to find a piece with which I could slit my wrists.

  On the third day they were a little more confident. The willingness of one inspired the other, a team-player mentality settling in as they tried not to let each other down. Phearson was careful never to be in the room when they went about their work, but always left a few minutes before, and returned a few minutes after. There was a rose-red sunset playing across my ceiling that third night. The others went out and he sat down by my bed and held my hand and said, “Jesus, Harry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that you’re doing this. I wish I could make it stop.”

  I hated him and started to cry, and pressed my face into his hand and knelt at his feet and wept.

  Chapter 19

  I had written two letters.

  Dear Jenny,

  I love you. I feel there should be more than this, more that should be said, but now I come to write to you, I find it is simply this. That there are no more words beyond these, that there is no truth greater, or simpler, or truer. I love you. I am so sorry that I have made you afraid, and so sorry for all that was said, and done, and which must be said, and done. I do not know if my deeds have consequences beyond this life, but if you should live on without me, do not blame yourself for what you shall hear, but live long, and happy, and free. I love you. That is all.

  Harry

  I put the address of a friend on the envelope in case her mail was being monitored. The second letter was addressed to Dr S. Ballad, neurologist, occasional academic rival, sometime drinking partner and, in a way which neither of us had ever really felt a need to express, a reliable friend. It said:

  Dear Simon,

  You will have heard things about me in recent months which will have led you to doubt and question. This letter will only deepen those doubts and questions, and for that I must apologise. I cannot here go into my situation, nor even the details of what I now need, for this is nothing if not a letter requesting a favour. Forgive me asking you to do this with so little to go on, but for our friendship, for the respect that is between us and for the hope of better times yet to come, please indulge my request. Below is a notice which I need posted in the personal section of the major newspapers. The posts must be on the same day, at the same time. The day itself is immaterial, save that it must be soon. If I get the chance, I will refund you the cost and do whatever it is I can to repay you for your courtesy and time.

  Looking at this letter you will doubt if you can do this. You will question my motives and your own responsibility towards me. I do not think that I can, with these few words, persuade you of a position you do not already hold. I can only hope, therefore, that the mutual bond which exists between us, and the guarantee I put in this letter of my good intentions and the entirely positive outcome of this deed, will be enough. If they are not, then I do not know what will come of me, and so I can only beg you, as I have never asked any such thing before, to honour this request.

  Give my love to your family, and best wishes to yourself, and know I remain,

  Your friend,

  Harry

  Beneath the letter was the text of the notice itself:

  Cronus Club.

  I am Harry August.

  On 26 April 1986 reactor four went into meltdown.

  Help me.

  The notice was printed in the personal columns of the Guardian and The Times on 28 September 1973 and expunged from all records three days later.

  Chapter 20

  Phearson broke me.

  Back again, back to my fourth life, and always we seem to return here, even when I try not to, back to kneeling at his feet, sobbing into his hand, begging him to make it stop, please, please God, make it stop.

  He broke me.

  I was broken, and it was a relief.

  I became an automaton, reciting newspaper headlines and stories I had seen, word by word, day by day, reaching back across the lives which had gone before. Sometimes I’d drift into the languages of my travels, mixing reports of massacres and rulers overthrown with the sayings of the Buddha or little pieces of Shinto dogma. Phearson never stopped or corrected me, but sat back while the tape recorder clicked on, two great fat wheels spinning, which seemed to require changing every twenty minutes. He had mastered carrot and stick: always he stood by me for the carrot and was never there at the stick, so that in my mind, though I knew this was precisely what he aimed to achieve, Phearson became something of a golden angel, bringing with him warmth and relief from pain. I told him everything: my perfect memory now become a perfect curse until, three days later, she came.

  I sensed, somewhere through the drugs and the exhaustion, her arrival as a commotion in the hall. Then an imperious voice rang out, “For goodness’ sake!”

  I was in the smaller of the two lounges, sitting hunched by the tape recorder as I always was, intoning dull recollections of the assassination attempt on President Reagan. She burst into the room in a flurry of long, almost medieval sleeves, her curly grey hair bouncing on her head like a creature living unto its own laws, the rouge on her face pressed deep into the canyons of her skin, her heavily ringed fingers flashing as she twisted them in the air. “You!” she barked at Phearson, who instinctively switched off the record. “Out!”

  “Who the hell are—”

  She cut him off with a single imperious gesture of her wrist, snapping, “Call your control, you ghastly little man. Dear me, what have you been doing? Don’t you realise how useless this all is now?” He opened his mouth to speak and again was stopped short. “Buzz buzz buzz, trot off, make your telephone calls!”

  Perhaps seeing that reasonable communication was not a likely outcome here, a scowl spread across his face and he strode from the room, slamming the door petulantly behind him. The woman sat down opposite me, and rather distractedly prodded a few buttons on the tape machine, chuckling at its size and response. I kept my eyes down on the floor, the fixed hunch of all frightened men awaiting retribution, unable to hope.

  “Well, what a terrible little pickle,” she said at last. “You look quite the state. I’m Virginia, if you’re wondering–which I can see you are. Yes you are, aren’t you?”

  She addressed me as one might speak to a frightened kitten, and the surprise more than anything else made me glance up towards her, taking in a brief impression of beaded bracelets and giant necklace that hung down a
lmost to her navel. She leaned forward on her cupped hands, looked me in the eye and held the gaze. “Cronus Club,” she said at last. “I am Harry August. On 26 April 1986 reactor four went into meltdown. Help me.”

  I caught my breath. She had seen my ad–but so could Phearson if he’d bothered to look. So could anyone who read the personal pages of whichever newspaper Simon had printed my message in. Help or retribution? Salvation or a trap?

  Either way, did I care?

  “You have caused us such a problem,” she sighed. “It’s not your fault of course, lambkin. I mean–look at you, of course, entirely understandable, such a shame! Now, when it’s all over you will be wanting post-traumatic stress counselling, although I understand how difficult these things will be to come by. You look… fifty, maybe? Which means you must have been born in the twenties–ghastly, so many Freudians in the twenties, so much wanting to sleep with your mother. There’s this wonderful little chap in Finchley though, very good, very understanding, no rubbish about cigars. Failing that, I always find local priests are handy, as long as you go to them in the form of a confessional. Scares the buggery out of them sometimes too! Now absolutely don’t, don’t.” She stabbed the table with her index finger, the little joint at the end bending backwards with the force of her determination. “Don’t tell yourself that just because you’ve been around a bit you’re not in a terrible state. You are absolutely in a terrible state, Harry dear, and the silent, noble number won’t get you anywhere.”

  Now I couldn’t look away from her. Was this face–this old made-up face beneath its bouncing mass of sprayed hair–salvation? Was this woman with her great dangling purple sleeves and chiffon cardigan, with her clattering pendants and expanding belly, a creature of the mysterious Cronus Club? I found it hard enough to think, let alone apply higher reason to the problem.