The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  “I’m okay now,” I say. “Anna, I know what I did was wrong. I’ve paid my debt. I’m ready to move on…with our life.…”

  I think I sound convincing.

  “Where’s our child, Anna? I want to hug and kiss her.”

  Anna smiles. She comes to me, into my arms, and the agents clap their hands and congratulate me.

  VII.

  I sit with Anna and my child for a family portrait at the shopping mall photo studio. The three of us smile. We are happy and tranquil. I can play the role, for a while, until I figure how to break out of this prison.

  —October, 2012

  San Diego, California

  WELCOME TO THE MEMOIRS

  I.

  Ah, the Lieutenant; let us consider the Lieutenant: I had every bit of admiration for the poor bastard, even though I knew he was insane. But: who could blame him? The unbearable conditions have to be taken into consideration: the war. The war was getting inside the shells of the best of us, and caused us all to be perverted.

  II.

  Gentleman:

  Once again I request that I be released from this confinement, that I be let out of the enclosure and given (if not all) some of the freedoms I once enjoyed. We are a free people, are we not? Even in this time of war, and as a loyal soldier of our fine democratic government, I have certain guaranteed rights as set forth by our founding fathers four hundred and twenty years ago.

  I have written my report and verified its veracity. My report is the truth and nothing but the truth. I have answered all your questions and endured hours of interrogation. I have taken the fabulation-detector tests and allowed wires and gewgaws to be hooked up to my head and my limbs.

  This just won’t do. I need to at least get out and exercise. Perhaps you can arrange for a pretty female to be brought into my enclosure and satisfy my needs? I know this is not beyond the scope of your abilities. I, like anyone else, have basic requirements.

  III.

  In medias res, folks, here I come: back from the battlefield and onto the homeland, where I determined it was my duty to pay a personal visit to the Lieutenant’s wife and explain to her how her husband died; that he was, in fact, a hero, and his death was for the defense and our survival as a civilized people. I had seen photos of the Lieutenant’s wife: he had shown everyone in the platoon the three pictures he always kept with him, and she looked pretty, but I must say she was far more attractive in person. She was a striking bitch with a shapely form and large, dark eyes. I think she already knew the truth; she looked like she’d been having a good cry. “Excuse me,” I said, “but I served with your husband; he was my commanding officer and the most staggering, patriotic, and intelligent individual I’ve ever had the pleasure of crossing paths with.” She reached out to me with her long thin arms and wrapped those appendages around me and we held each other and she cried. She cried so hard that I almost broke down myself, but I could not: it is not something an honorable soldier does. She held me tightly and the next thing I knew: we were kissing, we were passionately “making out,” and then we were in the bedroom on the bed and we started to make love. I inserted myself inside her and she hissed and I said, “That’s it, take it, take it,” I said, “I bet the Lieutenant never fucked you this good, you whore,” and then I told her the truth: I told her that the Lieutenant was a pathetic sorry case for a leader and that he was crazy and as well as disgusting; that he had done something so vile, so weird, he deserved to die. “How do like that news, bitch?” I said, and her mouth opened wide and she came, she came hard, and then I came and fell down on top of her. “I hate you,” I whispered, “I hate you.”

  IV.

  The Lieutenant often kept morale up by telling us how evil the enemy was. “They have to die, for all their crimes,” he said late at night, before morning arrived and the killing would resume. “Take into consideration how they live,” he said; “the color of their skin and the way their eyes are situated in their skull. And how they smell! And how they fight—with their sad guns and bullets and grenades. For all their weapons technology, we are winning this war using tried-and-true swords and arrows. For that, don’t they deserve to die? Eh?!”

  V.

  This will never work.

  Gentlemen, look: the Lieutenant was not the officer you think he was, and there is nothing I can do nor say, other than outright lying, to change that. I believe he was born that way: he was a deviant. He could not help himself.

  VI.

  “My wife is not enough for me,” the Lieutenant confessed to me one evening after he had too much bug juice to drink. “Oh, sure, she’s a sexy creature,” he said, bringing out the photographs, holding them like small treasures, “but I have an insatiable appetite, I am a monster when it comes to sex. I am a pleasure machine, and it doesn’t matter where I get it, as long as I make the conquest”; and while I like to tell myself the Lieutenant was merely inebriated, I understand now that a true self was emerging from his shell. He reached out for me and touched me tenderly. “I think you’re the same way, soldier,” he said.

  I pushed him away. I was disgusted. “You have me wrong, sir,” I said, “what makes you think I’m ‘like that’?”

  “Don’t be so backwards, soldier,” he said. “These are progressive times.”

  “I’m old-fashioned, sir.”

  “I could order you.”

  “And I could kill you,” I said; “it would be justifiable because there are laws about such things.”

  “This is war: the old laws do not apply on the battlefield.”

  “I am going to walk away, sir,” and I did.

  “This is just between you and me, soldier!” he yelled. “Just you and me and the breeze of the night!”

  VII.

  “Get out,” his wife said after I spent myself inside her a third time, after hours of fucking; “you disgusting bastard, get out, I hate you, you’re just like him, get out of my house!”

  VIII.

  From my report:

  We were doing a mop up in one of the enemy’s cities. Estimation is that 95% of the enemy had been removed like the revolting infestation they were; now it was a matter of seeking out and removing the stragglers who managed to slip away. It was a tedious operations that grunts such as ourselves were sent out to do: we went from structure to monolith, from domicile to dwelling, finding the vile vermin of our odium and terminating them with mercy and pity. It was best for the platoons to separate and become solo when entering the large facilities, those monuments of metal and glass erected in worship of whatever false god the enemy worshipped. This is when I heard the familiar cries, in the language and tone of a female enemy, inside a room. So in the room I went, and what I observed, I was not prepared for. I know the Lieutenant was an insane and disgusting excuse for one us, but not to this extent: I witnessed him holding down a female of the enemy and violating her. The Lieutenant had torn off her fabrics and was inserting his sex organ, by sheer brute force, into this female’s sex organ. My gorge nearly became buoyant upon seeing this blasphemous act of carnage and I yelled: “Lieutenant, stop what are doing now!” He laughed, oh yes: he laughed. He said, “Do not judge me, soldier, it is not as bad as you think, she is quite nice and you should take a turn when I am done!” Yes, indeed, yes, the Lieutenant had completely lost his mind, and per military mandate, I performed my duty, I did as the manuals instructed: upon such sexual deviation on the battlefield, I became judge and executioner. I unsheathed my sword, approached the Lieutenant, asked him to forgive me (for I was willing to forgive him) and inserted my blade with academic precision into his back, penetrating his heart, exiting the other end and killing the female enemy as well. I wept when I did this, even if I knew there was no hope for a obstinate member of our society: I closed my eyes and wept and said a prayer for his soul.…

  IX.

  Dear Sirs:

  Enclosed, please find the manuscript to my memoirs as a soldier in the last campaign, entitled Beyond the Enclosure. My accounts
, while horrific and explicit, are nevertheless true and I strongly feel it is important that the truth be told. Therefore, it is my sincere hope that your esteemed company will publish these humble pages.

  There is much debate in the press lately about whether or not the war was justified. Many of our citizens died. I, too, wished we had never left the confines of our underground dwellings and invaded the surface lands. But we must face the facts: the human beings were destroying this planet with their vehicles and their industry and their need for too much of the planet’s resources. We needed the same resources, and we needed this planet to be well in order to survive.

  So, yes, I am of the camp that concurs that while it was indeed genocide, it was quite necessary for our survival. And yet, the war is now over, and very few humans are left. I support the idea of the reservation on Madagascar where no more than 200 of the vile creatures’ infants will be maintained in a sterile environment, ignorant of their true lineage and history. And so, once again, the insects are the Stewarts of Earth, and we will do what is right to keep this round rock clean for democracy.

  It is my hope that you will find this manuscript suitable for publication.

  I look forward to your response.

  —May, 2008

  Borrego Springs, California

  THE DREAMER

  I.

  The third week I was there, the Dreamer—deep in the core of Ganymede—made contact. The Dreamer said to me: I know what you need. I replied: No one knows what I need because I don’t know what I need. The Dreamer said: I know what is destroying your soul and I can fix that—please let me help, it is what I do, it is why I was made.

  I had no idea what the Dreamer was: alien, machine, spirit, god.

  I had shipped out to the Ganymede Station to conduct sociological research on men and women in confined cramped quarters and limited personal space while in space. I applied for the grant and won. This is was what I needed at the time: to get far away from my old life. Off-planet seemed the best route for a woman in pain. My previous published books and papers made me a fine candidate for the study.

  Then I had the dreams: dreams of the Dreamer, and with the Dreamer was my dead son. I did not know how this was possible but I did not care; I held my dead son in my arms and I whispered: I love you. My dead son said: Love you back, mom.

  His name was to be David. David Kelly Greene. If he had lived.

  The Dreamer says: He does live.

  I said: Only here.

  The Dreamer said: That can change, with a simple thought, a request, a desire, and he will be yours.

  And I cried.

  II.

  Sally first said what we all wanted to say. During breakfast, the morning shift—half a dozen men and women—ate quietly, deep in thought, and I knew what was going on. I felt the same, I felt the energy in the air: fear and confusion.

  Sally said: You know, I’ve been having the strangest dreams all week about this gigantic alien creature with hundreds of tentacles.…

  Everyone stopped eating.

  Everyone turned at stared at her.

  Sally said: What?

  Someone asked: What color is this thing?

  She said: Gray.

  Someone else asked: Where is it from?

  Sally said: Down on the moon, I think.

  Everything looked at each other. We didn’t have to say it; we had all been having the same dream.

  Sally said: It speaks to me, it says it’s name is—

  The Dreamer, I said.

  Yes, she said.

  The Dreamer, everyone else said.

  The senior officer, Captain Nathan Lee, spoke what we were all thinking: Okay, what the fuck is going on here?

  III.

  The Dreamer: ten thousand feel tall. That is not an exact measurement, it is a guess. It towers into the skies deep below the surface of Ganymede, surrounded by the ancient machinery that keeps it alive, in stasis, keeping the enormous body functioning as the entity sleeps and dreams. Its forty eyes, each the size of a Mac Truck, closed. Tens of thousands of tentacles stretch out of its body like filaments of brain tissue, connecting to machinery and rock and a mist that permeates the interior space where the Dreamer rests.

  IV.

  Captain Lee gathered both crew shifts—twelve in all—and said: Obviously we are dealing with an intelligent something, a source, a being, and it’s made contact. What I want everyone to do is wrote down every detail—what was in your dreams, what was said, what you saw, what happened. Then we will compare everything and maybe we can figure what the hell is going on and what this Dreamer wants from us.

  Sally said: What if it doesn’t want anything?

  Every living thing wants something, said the Captain.

  I said: Or needs.

  Indeed, said the Captain.

  V.

  The Dreamer: Since before your species crawled out of waters and knew the difference between the soul and the body, I have been here, asleep. I have been a prisoner of my own free-will, exiled for my philosophy by my own kind, left behind on this dead moon, alone, so terribly alone. I have been reaching out to you and for thousands of years you have not listened. I would give you anything. I touched the spark that made you crawl from the sea. I sent you love, and still you would not listen. Now you are here, Erin, and you say that you will listen.

  VI.

  I will listen, I said, I will listen and I will dream with you.

  A bell rings. Come in, I say. The door to my quarters opens. Sally walks in, wearing only shorts. Her breasts are small and white. She does not ask first, she crawls into my bed and holds me. She knows I need the contact, and I know she needs it too.

  I’m scared, Erin.

  Don’t be.

  What does it all mean?

  I’m not sure yet.

  She kisses me and I kiss her back,

  She says: Do you know what I wanted to be when I was a teenager, when I was nine, when I was fourteen? I wanted to be a movie star. Is that funny?

  No, I say, and ask: That was your dream?

  It was, yes, it was, and when I was seventeen I started to go out to auditions, I tried to find an agent, I got headshots done, I did some modeling but the only modeling I could find was taking my clothes off. Your tits are too small, they told me. I refused to get plastic. I wanted to be real, nothing fake. But no one would cast me, no agent would take me on. You don’t have what it takes, they said. You don’t seem to reliable, they said. An agent said: You need training, you need school. The agent said: Go see this scout from Rutgers University. So I went to see this scout, this man, this older man, and I auditioned for him and he said I could get a scholarship to Rutgers, if I agreed live with him as his lover for six months. After six months, he said, I would have my foot into the mix and he would find another girl to replace. He wanted me to be his whore, Erin, and I said no, I said I would never sell my body to be an actress and he said: How the hell do you think any woman becomes famous in this business? He said: Everyone is a whore in Hollywood and if you’re afraid to be a whore, you’re afraid of success. I fell apart. I cried for weeks. Then I enrolled in the space program. My test scores were amazing. I was told: You can go places with these numbers, girl—you could go to space. I traded the stars for a different set of stars.

  I held her close, feeling and knowing her pain.

  She continued: But the Dreamer says that can all be different, that I can have my first true dream back, that if I forgive myself for all my mistakes, I can be the big actress I wanted to be ever since I was nine. Do you think this is true?

  I don’t know, I said.

  How could it be possible? To erase all my life and have a different life than this one? Would it be real?

  I don’t know, I said.

  When I was a teenager, I only made love to girls, Sally said, and when I went into the program, I only made love to men. I have been wanting to be next to a woman for so long.

  I had a girlfriend in college, I tell
Sally, but I disappointed her, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and she tried to teach me, but I was too dumb to be a dyke.

  We both laughed.

  He said: I know what you’re thinking, Erin.

  What?

  You want to go down there.

  I looked down at her belly, and beyond.…

  I mean Ganymede, she said, laughing.

  You’re a mind-reader now, I said.

  She said: I will go with you.

  It’s a risk.

  Of course.

  We could get in trouble.

  Of course.

  If we live, I said.

  If, she said.

  VII.

  We’re in the shuttle pod, Sally and I, departing the station and descending toward Ganymede’s surface. Captain Lee comes online: What the hell do you two think you’re doing?

  I said: You know the answer, Captain.

  Come back, now, that’s an order.

  I’m not military. I’m here to observe.

  Exactly! You’re not even trained to fly that pod.

  I’m flying it, sir, Sally said.

  We have not been cleared for a surface jaunt, the Captain said helplessly. The Captain knows this is futile: we will not abort.

  Captain, Sally said, you know we have to do this. We’re being called.

  Silence.

  I wish I was there with you, the Captain said.

  XIII.

  The Dreamer: For those who ask what does it all mean, the answer is simple: it means everything. Your dreams are my dreams and together we experience them together. But first, you must forgive: forgive yourself and forgive others and float on the cloud of your desires, and then you will have everything you always thought was only possible in another life not lived.

  IX.

  I held my newborn son in my arms, and placed my over-flowing breast to his mouth so he could feed and I could give him life. I sit down with my child and watch a movie starring Sally Evans.