Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3)

by Steven Drachman

  [*] What about — I wonder now, as I write this — the child conceived or not conceived in a commingling of two Roamers? That had no impact on the world of September 4, 1979, which I would shortly leave. But it would change the world to which Theera had departed. And it might have changed my world of 1877 as well, because knowing that I was a father of a child in another time might have changed me, although I imagine that it did not. But you see, this didn’t matter. I could not change the temporal realm into which my physical body dropped. That was the rule.

  [] I would later learn that what the Princess described that day is known as the “two streams” hypothesis. One might say that the Princess had a well-developed “dorsal stream,” the part of her brain involved in spatial identification and recognition, but a less-developed “ventral stream,” which controls long-term memories and emotions.

  [*] I don’t imagine that anyone will ever forget the joys of a bilbo catcher, but just in case, it was a wooden spindle, a wooden ball, and a wooden cup. Children of the 19th century loved this.

  [] This was an expression of the time. Master Yu had not to my knowledge really shot his granny.

  [*] We felt as you might, passing a terrible car wreck on the interstate that has made you late for Thanksgiving and put you in purgatory with your difficult Aunt Sarah: not apathetic about the death spewed across the pavement, but not primarily concerned with someone else’s mortality. We all die, after all, some of us ripped apart inside a Honda, and some of us inside a giant sand crab, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t still have places to go.

  [*] Master Yu did indeed say this very thing. I remember, because I determined to look this up upon my return to Malchut, rather than bother him with such things in the middle of our great mission. For those who doubt this account, I note that binary fission was first described in 1832.

  [*] Trumpe is an old word from the 1870s and 1880s, which describes an upper-class fake who exploits the disaffection of the lower classes to win political and financial power for himself. It fell out of use during the 20th century, but I understand that it will make a “comeback” in the early 21st century, should the world as we know it survive the Coming Storm.

  [] My yammering image was a precursor of those answering machine messages that would become popular in the late 20th century, and then would be wiped out by better technology, before the human population would reject the whole idea of “messages”, some decades later. (The collective human brain is like the ocean tides, changing every second.)

  [] Sometime later, once my sojourn in 枉死城　had ended — for indeed, as you know, I was destined to escape and to end my days here, on my ranch, in 1937, hiding from doomed modernity — I reminisced about Hell-sleep’s dire end with a group of fellow ex-cons, and I learned that only half of us had experienced this especial terror. Why I had been so lucky, I still do not know.

  [] While not strictly necessary for our story’s advancement, I thought it worth noting that the journey to inebriation, which in Malchut may be represented along a rising grid (flatlining at unconsciousness or death), is in 枉死城　represented instead by an asymptote, where the asymptote represents inebriation. With each new drink, you get closer to the y axis of inebriation, but you never touch it.

  [*] I remembered.

  [* ]* I’d learned about evolution a few years earlier in Utah, where I took a job as a ranch hand breaking horses, which I was good at, and where I pretended to be a drifter named Tom Shaw, from Kansas. One of the other ranch hands was a reader, and he’d read a book about “Darwinism.”

  [] The Algorian sea was once linked to the Xiorian Lake by a tributary, and the fish look nearly identical, but not completely. Cut off from their cousins some thousands of years ago by rock slides, an earthquake and other geological changes, the lake fish now look a bit different, and they have adopted different habits and customs, and a more provincial and insular view of life. Another thing, which I cannot precisely explain: the fish in the Algorian sea are not fish.

  [] As you may know, in 1916, I embarked on an ill-fated Hollywood silent screen “career.” Then and now, I am unsure why someone who does nothing all day but yell at people on the “telephone” — a bastard who does not grow fruits or vegetables, and does not actually make anything — has the brass balls to call himself a “producer.”

  [*] As I recall this incident, I think of the mirages in Abbott & Costello in The Foreign Legion, which I first saw during a Time-roaming trip to the 1950s. When I roamed Time regularly, back when I had the energy, I often visited “moving picture” houses; the images, like the people in these eras I visited, stared right through me, but I returned to my own time feeling stronger and happier than I otherwise would. As I face the end of 1936, my own last full year of life, I am happy to have experienced the rise of Bud and Lou in what I might call “real time.” To-day, as I recall various incidents from my time in Hell, I realize that many of them remind me of Abbott and Costello movies. Those two really understood Hell, I think.

  [*] One might argue that Tang saved my life on several occasions for the sake of the particular social good with which she and Billy were allied at the time, although I prefer to think that, at least once or twice, she might possibly have saved me because she liked me. I liked her. And so I prefer to think that she liked me as well, and that this may have played some role in her decision to save me, when I needed saving, from time to time.

  [] This is what we called “DNA” back then. We called it “nuclean.” We didn’t really understand it very well.

  [] One small comment is necessary here. First, how do I (a waif from the Five Points turned cow herder turned outlaw turned aimless old hermit) know about Plato? I studied him at the home for orphans on Randall’s Island in the 1850s. Next, how did I (a fellow who was not there) know what happened between Master Yu and his new bride? Am I indeed an “unreliable narrator”? I am not unreliable. Master Yu would entrust to me his journal in 1905 before fighting in the Battle of Sidonia, from which I would retrieve information used in this volume and volume 2 of my Memoirs, as well as volumes yet to be written, perhaps, if I might muster the energy in the little time left to me. Furthermore, Li-Ling, whom I would meet in the new century, would tell me much about Master Yu and their time together. I am a reliable narrator, and I would never mislead you, my readers.

  [] I did wonder how it could be possible to take a machine from the future to change the past without being expelled from the interlinear Maze, but Tang explained that this was a machine created by Roamers for Roamers, and so it was out of Time. No issue with the Maze.

  [*] Wesley was the crooked sheriff who’d robbed a train with Hester and me in Pyeton, in October 1878, and who owed me a few favors.

  [] Oscar dutifully sent home to her Majesty’s England a series of vignettes to no acclaim or appreciation, and thus his reportage on Savage Shakespeare never saw print and has been lost to time.

  [] He was no relation to the famous stage actor Harry Eytinge, I later learned.