Hey Mortality

by Kinsella, Luke

  As the vehicle started moving, I stared out of the window looking directly at nothing. A sad piece of violin music accompanied by cello filled the holes in my brain, and I thought how for the second time in my life I had let Lucy go. It was different though, I had a different kind of love for her now, a parental love that I could never let go of. I knew that she would grow up to be just fine, but without a father, it would be difficult for her at school. No one to turn to for fatherly advice. I wouldn’t get to watch her grow, teach her new things, help her when she needed it the most. It made me bitterly disappointed at the path my life had taken. Upset that for me, that right then, it felt like there wasn’t any other choice.

  I decided that I would head back to Japan and live out my years, most likely alone. All happiness I had had with Amanda and with Lucy would become lost for good. Nothing remaining, except for the memories, burned to me, engraved, like a terrible scar; unable to be shaken, destined to stay with me until the moment I die.

  I started to cry, silently, uncontrollably. I swallowed my tears, held them back. I needed to let go, but not right there. Not on a bus.

  At the second stop an old woman got on. She scanned the aisle and looked at me. She was very old, her skin tanned and thick with wrinkles. Hair grey, eyes brown and set so far back into her skull, I could barely be sure she even had eyes. She wore a knitted purple cardigan and a long black skirt. She carried in one hand a box wrapped in a white cloth. For whatever reason, she walked toward the back of the bus and took the seat next to mine.

  “May I sit here?” she asked, as she sat down. She spoke in Japanese.

  “You may,” I told her, as I wiped away the remainder of tears from my face.

  “Thanks.”

  We sat in silence for about five minutes, before the old woman started to speak again. “Don’t worry about her,” she told me, “she will be just fine.” She flashed me a small but warm smile.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lucy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I have seen many things. What was before, and what comes to follow.”

  “What things?”

  “Listen,” she said, almost abruptly, “I forgive you. You had to leave, you didn’t have a choice. I know that now.”

  I stared her straight in the eyes, the same eyes as my daughter.

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes, dad.”

  We both paused for a moment, me thinking, her clearly contemplating something beyond my own comprehension.

  “Let me tell you how it went, or how it goes. I spent my whole life searching for you. Searching for answers as to why you left. Then on my twenty-fifth birthday I received a letter, a letter from my future self, or as I should put it, a letter from this Lucy. In the letter, a lot of things were explained. What I needed to do, and why. How I needed to do it. The information I received was about my father, but not you as you are now, the younger version of you, the first one. That twenty-eight-year-old you. I was told that we were fated to meet during that business meeting. I was given your location, your history, where you worked, and who you worked for. Information about the Time Stone, how to calibrate it. All things that I discovered, things that I worked out over the years and needed to tell myself.”

  “Wait, you knew I was your father and you slept with me?”

  “I did, of course I did. I needed a child.”

  “You could have slept with anyone else.”

  “You don’t get it. We needed a child. That’s how it had to happen. The same reason that I was your child. The bloodline.”

  “The bloodline?”

  “Look, this might come as a slight shock, perhaps not, but anyway, we, as in you and I, we are not entirely human.”

  “Not human?” I found myself raising my voice accidentally. No one on the bus seemed to hear us, understand our language, or care.

  “Our bloodline dates back almost five thousand years. We came to this planet, about three hundred of us in total. Our mission was to fix the universe. We adapted to the humans climate, their gravity, modified our appearance genetically, and came here.”

  “To save the human race?”

  “Not the human race, the whole universe.”

  “The whole universe?”

  “Exactly. The universe is broken. Splitting apart. We needed to come here and stop that from happening.”

  “And how do we stop it from happening?”

  “By tying knots.”

  “Knots?”

  “Right, knots in the fabric of time. Each occasion the Time Stone is used, it creates a loop in time. Almost a time paradox of sorts, but that isn’t quite correct. For example, imagine a toy race car going around a figure-eight track. Everything is perfect, the speed remains the same, and the friction is steady. Maintaining a constant speed, the car whizzes around that track over and over again, that’s our knot. The problem with knots, however, is that they fray. Knots can be untied or they can break. Eventually that little car, for no reason at all, will fly off the track. Our job, as a species, is to make sure that there is another track waiting for the car to land on.”

  “Another knot.”

  “Another knot, exactly.”

  “But what has that got to do with bloodlines?”

  “Right, the Time Stone. The machine can’t be used by just anyone, only Pure Beings with our bloodline. The problem is that there aren’t many Pure Beings left, not many people still around to tie the knots. Plus, they are very difficult to track down. Most of our species have integrated into this world as the thousands of years have gone by, forgetting the importance of ancestry, and the reason we are here. They have completely lost sight of their purpose to keep the universe from falling apart.”

  “I’ll be completely honest, this is the first I have heard of any of this.”

  “Your parents are both Pure Beings. Perhaps they were just waiting for the right moment to tell you, or because of some other event in time, they already knew that things would turn out all right for you, and your knot would be tied.”

  “How do you know about all this, the Pure Beings, the bloodlines, the tying of knots in the fabric of time?”

  “I went back and studied. Back to the start. Back to the time when we arrived. But that’s a different story I suppose.”

  “And how did you return home.”

  “I used the Time Stone, of course.”

  “When I took the leap before, the Time Stone didn’t come with me.”

  “That’s how it works. It stays in the exact location it was occupying when the Pure Being uses it. Once you travel back, or forward through time, the machine stays where it was when it was last used. At any point in time, the Time Stone is always present in some location. Now finding it is the tricky part. I found it okay in 2015, thanks to your phone call. But back then, five thousand years ago, it was protected inside a pyramid. It was very difficult to gain access to it, but I managed.”

  “Wait, my phone call? You didn’t answer the phone.”

  “The phone call you haven’t made yet, the one that this you will make twenty-three years from now.”

  “I see, and what do I tell you?”

  “You give me the location of your gravestone.”

  “My gravestone? But I’m not dead?”

  “The future you is dead. Dead and buried.”

  “So what’s the location, then I will tell you in twenty-three years.”

  “You know the location. In Beppu, where the old version of you is buried, with the apple tree.”

  A certain connection came together, in what was quite an obvious twist in the story of my life, but I didn’t see it. I am the Duck Man. Dead, but ever living, like he told me in the dream. I paused for thought for a moment, recalling the words the nurse had said, that I was also destined to be in a lot of pain.

  “Should I leave the Time Stone at the grave?” I asked.

  “You will leave the Time Stone at the grave, you can’t change a future th
at I’ve already observed.”

  “If I can’t change the future, then isn’t all of this, everything about keeping the universe together, isn’t it all in vain?”

  “Not quite. Like I said, the car will fly off the track one day, and without these binds in place, there will be nothing to hold any of it, any of us together.”

  “Why Timothy Leary?”

  Lucy laughed suddenly, “That’s obvious. Two weeks after you called me I ran into Jun. He said you told him you were going away forever and that you were having some very strange lucid dreams.”

  “Yeah, oddly about the end of the universe.”

  “I have the same kind of dreams. It’s our way of connecting to ourselves.”

  “Connecting to ourselves?”

  “Yeah, like shared consciousness. Those dreams came from another version of you, your physical self in a different time, but the dreams of that self are able to cross through time to reach the other versions of you. That’s something that Prof. Timothy Leary prophesied in his research, shared consciousness. Perhaps he too was a Pure Being, or he had evolved like us in his ability to share dreams, or maybe he took too many drugs, who knows? But that was perhaps the reasoning as to why you selected that name, or maybe you chose that name because I just told you this now. Any number of reasons I suppose. I did a lot of research before I travelled for the first time, which wasn’t for many years after I walked out on you in 2015. I left most of that research with Keiko. Oh, Keiko is our daughter by the way.”

  “And also my granddaughter?”

  “Yeah, that’s about the sum of it.” Lucy gave me that famous snow white smile one more time, though her teeth weren’t quite as I remembered them thanks to age.

  “So, what am I supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t know, go buy a Monkey Park?”

  With that we had reached my stop. We both stood up and had a long hug. A father and daughter embrace lasting for twenty seconds but feeling like eternity. My mind was spinning with so many ideas and thoughts just moments before, but in that embrace, all those thoughts were gone. My mind completely clear. Cleaned out. Empty.

  I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Lucy did the same.

  “I want you to take this,” she said, handing me the box wrapped in a white cloth.

  “Time Stone?” I asked.

  “Time Stone,” she said.

  “Thanks, Lucy, I will truly miss you,” I said, realising my voice had a certain cheeriness to it that might have been inappropriate.

  “See you, then,” she said, a deep swallow lingered in the back of her throat.

  I got off the bus, and Lucy took her seat again at the back. As I glanced through the window to give her a wave, she wasn’t looking at me, she was instead sat with her face in her hands, almost like I had been when she had arrived on the bus; tears rolling down her face, anguish all around her.

  That was the day that Lucy died.

  ***

  Before the flight back to Tokyo, I decided to get drunk. I needed to wash away the day, the hardest day. I checked my baggage into the hold, and was surprised that I was not questioned as to why I was taking a black stone sphere half the size of a bowling ball with me.

  In the airport lounge, I got so drunk that I was shocked I was even allowed on the flight. Well, I would have been shocked, if I could remember getting on the flight in the first place.

  I landed in Tokyo, hungover and with a head that felt like it had been crushed in a vice.

  I grabbed my luggage and took a train to Shinjuku. There, I booked a few nights in a business hotel. Tying together the fragmented pieces of the puzzle; I was the Duck Man. I somehow convinced myself to travel back in time, to suffer a life of tragedy and misery. I mean, it hadn’t all been bad. Meeting Sara, meeting Amanda, having a daughter, and then seeing her all grown up. But the bad things far outweighed the good. Leaving people behind, so much death, so much pain and suffering.

  After a few days in Shinjuku I finally returned to Beppu.

  ***

  I visited the grave of myself, the apple tree a few metres taller, but still too young to bear fruit. The tree itself hardly resembled the tree planted there in 1977.

  I once again sat on the nearby swings and was taken back to that day where I sat swinging those years ago. Just after Timothy Leary had been buried. Just after the Duck Man had been buried. Just after I had been buried.

  I thought about it too hard. That was me in the ground, my decaying corpse. I was there right now and dead. The universe continued to carry on, for now, flowing from the river of time, observing my life. I still existed somewhere along my journey of life, even though I was dead. Even though that older version of me didn’t exist anymore; dead under that growing apple tree. But I was still alive, I wasn’t completely gone.

  I remembered my dream about death not being real. The words from my dream resonated within me.

  There was nothing left for me to do but wait for the end. That wasn’t living, it was merely waiting for the inevitable.

  I calculated that I had only twenty-three years left to live. I knew how I would die, suffering in pain in a hospital bed in Beppu, not too far from where I was swinging. Fated to die, and knowing when and how it would happen. That is perhaps the worst information to ever discover, to ever be told; depressing. I had to forget, I had to find a way to relax. It was hard though, hard to push those thoughts away.

  Some children showed up and wanted to play on the swings, so I hopped off and left the park.

  ***

  Years rolled on and on, flickering by like the quick skipping of pages in a book. Me counting days, drinking too much, drinking to cleanse my mind. I bought a house by the beach in Beppu, and as the years rolled by, in 1994, I bought the Monkey Park.

  I still had so much money that I decided to offer an anonymous donation to research into counterfeit money fraud, and donated specifically to a new start-up company owned by my father.

  Some days I would simply kill time by sitting, staring at the Time Stone. Its slick black shell contained the fate of the entire universe. Distracted by the thought of travelling again, I could escape to somewhere far off in the past or the future, end the boredom and leave this world. But what of the consequences? My whole purpose now was to keep the order. Keep the balance of time and save the universe from inevitable collapse.

  ***

  One day I remembered something the Duck Man had said to me before I took the leap, something about sending monkeys back in time, three monkeys I think he had said. Perhaps that was my next task.

  Late one night when the Monkey Park was closed and the staff had gone home, I waited. That night, I took out the Time Stone and left it for the monkeys to experiment with. For some reason, the monkeys didn’t seem too interested in the darkness of the sphere. Eventually, one monkey keenly walked over to it and hesitantly touched it, but nothing much happened. I suppose it was difficult to communicate to a monkey that it needed to imagine travelling back through time. Did monkeys even know the concept of time? If not, they were a lot luckier than I was.

  My thoughts drifted back to what Lucy had said on the bus those years ago about bloodlines. If only Pure Beings from our bloodline could use the machine, how was I going to send a monkey back? I tried for a few nights, always leaving the Time Stone laying around to see if any of the monkeys would figure things out, but nothing ever transpired.

  Eventually I gave up and put it all down to my own lies, a simple story I had told myself to convince me to time travel. With fate unchangeable, regardless of my failure, I would undoubtedly tell my younger self the same story about the monkeys and the made up research.

  ***

  As quickly as my new life in Beppu had begun, and with me beginning to look more and more like the Duck Man every day, years became months became weeks, and it was almost time.

  Eventually the year turned to 2009, the same year that my wife would sadly die.

  There are certain things that at the time,
people don’t talk about. It never occurred to me when I first met Lucy, to pry further into the details of her mother’s death. I didn’t want to upset her by digging up the past. I never asked for the date that Amanda died, or where she was living when she died. Perhaps it was that same house I had bought in London, or perhaps she had sold up after I left and gone and lived somewhere else, somewhere free of the memory of me. It was pointless trying to work it out. It had simply never occurred to me to ask.

  I kept checking the obituaries of the newspaper websites in London, those that covered the area in which we had lived, but nothing ever surfaced. Maybe she changed her name, maybe she had nobody in her life that would take the time to write about her. I knew that Lucy went to the funeral, I could have tried to find her, find out where she lived, follow her for a year until one day she would leave for the airport, and then I would know. But, as those thoughts of wasted time filled my days, I decided to simply do nothing.

  I wanted desperately to go back to England for the funeral. Pay my final respects to a woman that I had loved. A woman that gave me a daughter. A woman that I unfairly abandoned those many years ago, but I simply couldn’t. Instead, I just waited alone. I thought about death, cried about what I had done, and decided that I hated the universe for killing people, hated the universe for making life so absolutely miserable. I came to despise time more than time itself.

  ***

  The years drifted by like a Bullet Train, and in the summer of 2015, I went back to Tokyo. I arranged for fake identification to be made for myself, and for my younger self. I sold all of my investments and took out all of my money. I invested half in the future of the Monkey Park, a place I had grown to love. I made a will leaving everything else to Lucy, Keiko, Jun, and my parents. At least after I was gone, after I had mysteriously vanished to never be found, I would be declared dead, and some people would have a decent life after all of this. The universe would carry on spewing out misery, but providing the people I loved the most with some financial support, might just provide them with a better life than my own.

  One day, I wrote a note to myself. As I wrote the words I realised just how ridiculous they sounded. I was obviously in a bad place when I read them those thirty-eight years ago, in any other state of mind, I would have screwed the words up and thrown them in the trash, not giving them a second thought. They read: