The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  “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.

  Chapter 57

  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 t
o 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.

  Chapter 58

  A hospital bed.

  Awakening.

  A figure by my side.

  Vincent, folded up beneath the curves of his arm, sleeping, his head resting against the mattress where I lay.

  I woke from my own Forgetting, from my own encounter with mental death, and I was…

  … still myself.

  Still me.

  Still Harry August and I remembered…

  … everything.

  I lay still a while, not daring to move in case I woke Vincent with my stirring, and my mind raced. I was still a prisoner in Pietrok-112. I was still a threat to Vincent. I was still dying, my body consumed by the poison I had ingested, but my mind–my mind was my own. Like I had with Akinleye, Vincent would want to test this hypothesis when I woke, would look for any sign that there was still a Harry left in my mind. I would not give it.

  Some part of me must have twitched because Vincent jerked awake at my side. Seeing my eyes open, at once he leaned forward and examined me, as a doctor might examine a patient, looking for responses behind my eyes. I considered speaking, considered reverting back to my native tongue, to my native voice, as Akinleye had, but it seemed an over-complication. Instead I opened my mouth and made an empty baying animal sound of distress, which hardly took any mimickry to achieve, so ravaged was my body by poison and pain.

  “Harry?” Vincent was holding my hand, as I had held Akinleye’s, and his face was a picture of concern. “Harry, can you hear me?” He spoke Russian, and I just wailed the louder. Seeing this, he switched to English. “Are you all right? Are you OK?”

  He was playing the concerned friend. The cheek of it almost roused me to reply, but there was so little time left, so little life, best not to squander it now. Besides, in the time I had been unconscious more tissue had died inside my body, and now all I could do was lean over the side of the bed and heave up a stomach full of acid and blood. I like to think some of it got on Vincent’s shoes before he managed to jump back. My head was pounding, and someone had lined the inside of my eyes with Velcro, which crackled around the inside of my skull whenever I tried to look. My left eye kept going off in its own direction
, creating a bewildering picture of a room with a gap down the middle as my brain tried and failed to join up the confusing sense data coming into its core. Poor old Vincent–the timing couldn’t have been worse for him–not enough time to see if I was faking before I would inevitably die. He chose a bolder test. Leaping back from my bed he waved at two guards, barking in Russian, “Take him!”

  They took me, one arm each, and dragged me out of my bed. They hauled me down the corridor–I was in no fit state to be anything other than hauled–and dropped me on my knees in a shower room where a lifetime ago I’d had an encounter with a very friendly lab assistant called Anna. Vincent stood in the door and barked in English, “Kill him!”

  What was I meant to do? There was a risk that, by demonstrating comprehension of the order, I would show that my grasp of language had survived intact. Then again, if I took my own impending death too calmly, that might suggest that I had a residual awareness, an understanding that death was a relief in this scenario. Thankfully, the wretched state of my own body did most of the work for me as, finding itself dragged down a hall and deposited so unceremoniously, it duly went into convulsions which, I suspected, were the penultimate step in departure anyway, and I didn’t even notice when the bullet went into my brain.

  Chapter 59

  My thirteenth life began…

  … exactly as it always had.

  Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ladies’ washroom. After all the drama I’d been half wondering if I’d wake up the son of a king. If there was any form of divine justice in this universe, it was clearly taking its time in getting round to the affairs of the kalachakra.

  The usual process. Passed over to Patrick and Harriet, raised as their own. I began to reclaim memory by the age of three and was, I am informed, a remarkably quiet child of very little note. Aged four I was on the verge of full faculties, and by my sixth birthday I was ready to go out into the world and declare to all members of the Cronus Club the simple truth of Vincent’s plans and the things he would do to achieve them.