What did I say – all sorts pass through? You don’t imagine you’re the first, do you? I mean, it’s not like there’s a chronological order. And where else are you lot going to turn up, if not here? Time travel being like the telephone, you need two machines – one now and another in the future – for any communication to take place. The boffins – and I’m not one of them, so don’t expect me to get technical – they reckoned the portal would change our world. Turns out it changed yours. As soon as it was built, a flood of you arrived from the future. Not to save humanity, mind. Not to teach us about peace and love and how to build a fusion reactor. Oh no. The greatest scientific triumph in human history and all to place a bet on the Grand National.
I’ll grant you, motivations this end were not much better. The gift of hindsight? Only if there was money to be made from it. We cut deals with the canny ones who guessed what would appeal to our masters. Stole a technological march on our competitors. We got a head start on the future and you got to tweak the past to your advantage. Only we hadn’t thought things through. Because each new arrival was coming from a different possible future. Each future shut down other futures – euthanised this genius, set that criminal mastermind on a path to dentistry. The flood of visitors became a trickle. Each new arrival was cancelling out his or her successors. Sometimes even his own ancestors. Now those were the really spectacular visits. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a space-time paradox implosion? Anyway, the upshot of it all is quarantine. We can’t let you out. Can’t let you tamper with history. Which, don’t forget, is destiny for us.
Go back, you say? Step back through there? Oh dear, oh dear. Didn’t you know? The telephone analogy isn’t watertight. This portal’s receiver only.
Now there’s no sense in wearing yourself out. Please sit down. Sit down or we’ll have to pacify you.
There. Catch your breath.
I hope you don’t think this is personal. There are rules. There are protocols. If you’re still here tomorrow my superiors will want to debrief you. It’s a simple enough procedure. It won’t hurt. What happens then? Let’s not trouble ourselves trying to second-guess the future.
Human rights? I don’t think they come into it. After all, you’ve not yet been conceived.
Sound proofed. What’s that? No one can hear you. Except me, and I’m only the janitor. That’s the thing about scientific miracles. There’s always some poor bugger who has to stay behind to tidy up the mess.
The Dirty Realist Choose Your Own Adventure Book
Try as you might, you cannot unscrew the cap. It’s locked tight, like some witch has placed a goddamn curse upon it. If you decide to use your teeth, turn to page 32. If you smash the bottle and drink from the broken neck, turn to page 56.
She lies down, complaining of the heat. You don’t say anything, even though she’s about to roll her ass over the soiled patch. You sit quietly on the edge of the mattress and watch as she writhes, making small cat noises. Is it worth the effort? If yes, turn to page 104. If no, turn to page 9.
Even after twenty days, you still can’t believe this girl is your daughter. She stands in your garage, so lank and ungainly that you find yourself resenting her. She asks if she can do anything to help. Does she know about cars? Would she recognise a wrench from a spanner? If yes, turn to page 28. If no, turn to page 80.
Long after she’s gone, you’re still picking hairs out of your teeth. Not even the taste of mouthwash can chase the numbness away. Do you go to your son’s baseball game like you promised (page 24), or do you find that bottle you stowed under the pickup (page 71)?
She hands you the monkey wrench and you stare at her, impressed. You let her stay on while you slide under the truck. Lying there, you can’t help admiring her legs. If you feel ashamed, turn to page 42. If you keep looking despite your best efforts, turn to page 117.
The baseball game is sparsely attended. Some goofball is wearing a corncob outfit. You look for your son in the field but can’t make him out. Surely you haven’t got the date wrong? You check your wristwatch but remember it’s broken. If you ask the fat dad next to you, turn to page 27. If you decide to stick it out despite your thirst, turn to page 51.
Even though she offers, you turn her down. She doesn’t seem at all disappointed – in fact she looks relieved – but all the same you worry she’ll feel rejected. Do you tell her lies about your potency? Go to page 70. Do you force yourself to give her a kiss? Go to page 64.
Your neighbour, Peggy, stands grinning behind the fly screen. You take a deep breath, guessing what she’s come for. If you invite her inside, turn to page 13. If you decide to make an excuse, turn to page 43.
She tells you she made it all up. She isn’t kin. Once you spoke kindly to her Mom is all. Ever since, she has loved you from a distance. She begins to weep. Do you kick her out? Go to page 90. If you feel sorry for her and decide to let her stay, go to page 12.
You spend the day in bed. Turn back to page 1.
What gets lost
Finally made it to the village. Our guide got hopelessly lost – like a drunk who can’t find his way around his own backyard. After wading through bogs and practically breathing mosquitoes, we were welcomed by the elders. They seem shocked to learn that we lost our path.
It is not a good sign. In the past the spirits guided us, so long as we spoke their names and places.
Yuri asked who was most likely to remember the old folk remedies. Our best bet is an elderly woman who lives near the river. She received us without a hint of suspicion.
He wants to ask me about the forest plants? What can I tell him? I have forgotten so many of their names.
Bad diarrhea. Confined to our hut but Yuri has been making friends with Galina. I guess she feels more at ease with her one of her own countrymen.
I find I must take such wandering journeys through your language to say what would have taken a moment in my own. I am not used to talking like this. I have spoken more in three days than I did in a month. But these words are like dry grass in my throat.
The old woman is small, moon-faced. She doesn’t smell too good but why should she? Everyone here stinks.
What can I tell you about the forest? What can I say about the plants that heal? I have forgotten the word for the whispering of birch leaves in a storm, for the flapping of an eagle’s wings. I have forgotten the words that used to describe every feature of a hill, so that no one could lose their way upon it.
Her mind is defective so we play things by the book. Try to jog her memory: dig up old stories, creation myths.
It had something to do with a duck. There was an egg at the beginning of the world. Tell your American I cannot remember. Nobody here can. I am the last speaker of our language. My children can understand it but they will not speak it. My grandchildren barely recognise a word.
Lots of reminiscences, scant progress. Was this trip a mistake? Siberia’s a barren place for ethnobotanical research. And I’m sick to death of reindeer meat.
Do you see that jacket, that hat? They belonged to our last storyteller. He was a shaman – in my parents’ day. Sometimes his stories would go on for many nights. He was taken away in the great white month.
Another frustrating day. The old lady is cagey. What has Yuri been telling her?
I was only a girl but he had no one else who wanted to learn from him. Before he died he agreed to teach me. I learned many of the stories but it is years since I told them. Who would listen now? Who would understand?
Galina refuses to speak to us – or to anybody. She’s been locked in her cabin for days. Yuri says she’s remembering. Remembering what? He shrugs, inscrutable.
If birds live in the sky and fish in the water, old people live in silence. I will die next year. I can feel the bones sharp against my skin. But I am no longer afraid. It has taken great effort and pain but I have come out of the chrysalis. The stories are at my back like wings. I shall fly with them one last time.
Yuri did not even alert me to wha
t was going on. He’s become so quiet and uncooperative. I went looking for him and found him standing in a clearing, looking towards the bank of the river. He gestured to me to be quiet and I saw what he was watching. The old girl has gone crazy. She was wearing that tatty waistcoat and hat – the ones from the nail on her wall. She was sitting on her own by the river, on a tree stump. In her lap was a bowl of something – tea? And she was shaking drops of it into the river and the grass from a kind of strainer. I swear she was talking to the air. It was like a performance, not a song exactly but an incantation, a prayer that went on and on, until the sun set. I guess she was telling her stories, the ones I wanted to hear, that might contain some useful information. Her words came in gusts towards us but Yuri could not understand them. Let the wind carry them, he said, weirding me out. Wherever it will take them.
Bookends
Bibliophagy
In the noble history of our Resistance, one death stands out for its strange defiance. That it was an act of defiance did not immediately occur to the enemy. The harassed coroner delivered a verdict of suicide brought on by insanity. It suited our foes to believe as much – or as little – but we know better and commend the sacrifice of Mr H.
From the information available it would appear that Mr H, a bachelor, inherited his library from his father and grandfather, both of them notable patriots. His one eccentricity involved his beloved cats, which he would send after their deaths to a local bookbinder. The policeman who discovered Mr H’s remains might have noticed on his depleted bookshelves all six volumes of Gibbon bound in tabby and calico fur.
Mr H’s corpse was surrounded by shreds of paper, half-digested boluses of vellum and empty bindings discarded like oyster shells. It is evident that, at the darkest time for our nation, Mr H locked himself away and set to eating all those books which would, he correctly surmised, be proscribed by our enemy. His death must have been an agonising one; yet he persisted, carefully detaching page by page from its binding with a decorative paper knife. Sometimes, with leather covers, he appears to have boiled them down and swallowed strips with brandy. His water-meter suggests a great consumption of water. The project must have taken several weeks.
The Resistance heralds the significance of this act of protest. For comparison one must look to Jan Palach or the Buddhist monk, Thìch Quąng Đųc. Unlike these protestors, however, Mr H went on to defy his enemies after death. In his will (which has subsequently disappeared from the Records Office), Mr H left money for a certain provision: that he be flayed by his friend the bookbinder and his skin used as the binding for a photograph album. The authorities, not yet recognising the significance of this request, gave up the body. One of our agents has seen the result. The photographs in the album depict Mr H’s family over the course of a century. On the last page a black and white photograph shows a boy, presumed to be Mr H, seated in a dappled arbour with a great volume of poetry open on his knees.
All who knew Mr H considered him a gentleman: a primary school teacher of thirty years and a keen amateur writer who retired early to pursue his literary ambitions. Who would have suspected him capable of martyrdom? Evidently it was the intolerable affront of occupation that spurred him to it. Confronted by tyranny he consumed his books and saved them from the bonfire. After his death Mr H (who never found a publisher), sealed his defiance by becoming a book himself. Thus we can conclude of him as John Earle in his Microcosmographie did of the antiquarian: “His grave does not fright him for he has been used to sepulchres, and he likes death the better because it gathers him to his fathers.”
Essential words of the Empress Shōtoku
Feeling her death upon her – that last and implacable courtier – the empress Shotoku vacated the throne and took to her bed. Neither elaborate ritual nor the studied expressions of mildness on the faces of her servants could conceal a general fear of contagion; for the boils were stark and angry, white-tipped craters, in the ravaged imperial face, and a smell came off her that all the perfumes of Asia could not mask.
In the world that would continue without her, the cold weather was closing in. Decay swept past her open window: leaves shredded from cherry boughs, birds like strips of cloth tossed hither and thither by the autumn wind.
From all over the empire, officers of many ranks were gathering for the ritual of the Eight Readings.
The Empress moaned. It was difficult, through the fog of her pain, to discern the lineaments of her achievement. Still, the physicians held off with their salves and potions, for she wanted to keep her mind clear before the end.
In the night, she cried out for her friend, the Lady Himegimi, who was summoned from her apartments. “What troubles your Majesty,” Himegimi asked, glad for once of the formality that prevented her from touching the Empress.
Shotoku muttered of fire and ashes.
The Lady Himegimi assured the Empress that her legacy was secure, that in her wisdom she had defeated all rebellion and ensured stability for years to come. The Empress toiled to breathe; she fought not to claw at her face. At last she slept, and the ghosts who visited her could not agree on her name. To her father, who smiled at her while filling his quiver with arrows, she was the princess Abe-hime. To the poet and courtier Nakamaro, she was Koken, the pliable and credulous young empress. She looked Nakamaro again, bowing before the executioner’s sword, and the name that flew from his lips across the waters of Lake Biwa was Shotoku, tyrant and whore of the monk Dokyo.
The Empress awoke with a fever. For a time she did not know who she was, for her essential name eluded her. Perhaps she had no essence beneath the layers of silk and custom, nothing solid and unchanging by which to know herself. A frosty day dawned and her fever abated. She remembered how, as Koken, she had become a tool for Nakamaro. That misfortune, and the forced abdication that followed, had taught her the power of names to efface dishonour. Under her final name, that still clung to her as she clung to life, she had reclaimed the Chrysanthemum Throne and destroyed her many enemies.
A bowl of soup was brought to her but she could not eat it; nor could she recall, in daylight, whether she had dreamt the visit of the Lady Himegimi. In the afternoon, a clearing opened briefly in the thorny wood of her delirium and she glimpsed the form of her legacy. The vision eased a little of her pain. Summoning the abbot, she told him to bring her one of the stupas, a miniature wooden pagoda, from the palace temple, so that she might hear again the dharani-sutra, those essential words printed on her orders on the longest strips of paper ever made.
The abbot performed as he was tasked; and so, with monks to chant the words that would outlast the ruin of her age, the Empress listened to the distillation of human knowledge. One million stupas had been constructed and dispatched throughout the empire. Each contained, in prayer form, a key to the universe, ascending in circles from earth to the heavens and wound about the Buddha’s staff.
“Again,” the Empress whispered, and the words were chanted, over and over, into the Month of Frost, into the mouth of darkness, monks taking turns, with eyes averted from the imperial bed, to build temples of prayer with their voices, until the monk Dokyo, who owed his temporal power to her favour, lifted a lantern to his mistress’s face and saw that she had taken leave of the world and all the names to which she had answered while she lived.
A pillow book
“Delivered. I resent the use of that word.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“You make it sound like a baby.”
“Well consider. There’s the pleasure of conception, then the slog of gestation. Those pains in your lumbar, the bursts of impatience. You even find yourself prey to strange appetites.”
“That slut in publicity, for instance.”
“What an imagination you have, darling. You should consider writing fiction. But no more interruptions please; a sustained metaphor is going begging. You object to my use of the word ‘delivery’, as though somehow something that everyone does – from the milkman to the centre forwar
d – belongs only to women in parturition.”
“You always use long words when I’m on a short fuse.”
“It seems quite the right word to me. I have conceived and I have laboured…”
“Oh Jesus.”
“What?”
“This is typical of you: typical. The one thing women have over men and men rub their grubby metaphors all over it. Delivered indeed. You needed more help for this ‘delivery’ than any hospital could provide.
No peremptory epidural for you, no rushed visits from the overloaded midwife. For you it was smooth sailing and you haven’t a scar to show for it, with your readers and advisers, your givers of tea and sympathy, your indulgent wife, your cosseting agent, your assiduous secretary, and even – dear God, in this day and age! – even a bloody typist.”
“You ought to approve: I’m keeping the sisterhood in curry.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe your cheek.”
“Yours are growing blotchy, dear.”
“You insufferable conceited middle-aged… You cannot possibly have the faintest notion what you’re talking about. Look! This. Through an aperture like that. Can you have any conception of the agony involved?”
“I assure you, my darling, that’s not how melons come into the world. Helena… Sweet one…. Let’s not quarrel. Today was a happy day. You should be glad for me.”
“Bully for you. Back to the fun of the book fair.”
“You know I don’t enjoy them.”
“Oh I’m sure it’s a great burden: all that attention, those trustafarian groupies…”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“You have form.”
“What?”
“You have form.”
“My God, you have a sweet tooth for poison memories.”
“Don’t mix your metaphors.”
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