Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  I comforted her as best I could over the phone, standing there in the hallway with the shouts of the playpark kids and the fish-market habitues coming in through the thin door. I think I helped her with just the sound of my voice – a reassurance to her that she still had something left of her family. After I put the phone down I trudged slowly up the stairs to get my bags packed.

  ~

  It was nearly a month later that I returned, and then only briefly – to tell the folk at the university face-to-face that I was abandoning my doctorate, and to clear out my apartment. It was pathetic that I could fit all my remaining possessions there into a single medium-sized case. I yelled a goodbye to Mrs. Bellis as I departed, case in hand, but her only response was to jack up the volume on her tv set a bit higher and to emit one of her thunderous farts as a farewell memento – one of the most effective mementos I've ever been given, in fact, because I can remember it quite clearly to this day.

  On my way to the station, I made a detour to bid adieu to the Rupolo, the place where I'd spent so many happy Monday afternoons, the place that had been responsible for changing the course of my life. From a distance the cinema looked very much as tatty usual, but as I approached it along the sidewalk I realized that its doors had been boarded up and that the posters outside still advertised Robotic Cop Two. Although I was becoming a little anxious about being in time to catch my train, I went into Mr. Perkins's deli to ask him what had happened; from the fact that he refused to answer me, or even to recognize me, I deduced that the cops had finally stepped in.

  On the train, as soon as we'd left the station behind, I pulled out of my bag the copy of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema I'd bought with part of my father's surprisingly sizable legacy and began to browse lackadaisically through it. I hardly saw the words, though. Instead I was thinking about how my life had changed so radically over the past few months, and in particular over the past few weeks. Mom had initially not taken kindly to my insistence that I was ditching my veterinary career in favor of becoming a student of the cinema – she had wailed that I was insulting my father's memory, for had he not paid to put me through college so I could establish myself in a worthwhile and respected career? – but eventually she saw such moral-blackmailing arguments were going to get her nowhere, and that I was absolutely resolute about my new future. After a while she actually began quite to like the idea, and started introducing me to her friends as "my son, the film critic."

  The funeral had been ghastly, of course. My father had more friends in death than he had ever had in life. The worst moment of all was when, after the service, Glenda Doberman made a bulging attempt to hit on me. Gossip must have exaggerated the size of my inheritance.

  Still idly turning the pages of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema, I forced such memories out of my head. This was a more recent edition of the book than the one in the university library, and I wondered if the expansion trumpeted in the blurb meant that it now included some of the old World War II movies I'd watched in the Rupolo.

  No such luck.

  I gazed out the train window at huge cornfields and placid cows speeding by, and another fantasy began to build itself in my mind.

  It had been my assumption that Andrew Brunner had omitted the movies I'd watched on Monday afternoons because of their seditious content, their undesirability – he didn't list porn flicks, so it was reasonable to figure that he wouldn't want to list politically reprehensible movies either, censoring himself for reasons of either pragmatism or good taste. Or perhaps his publishers had insisted such items be expunged.

  But what if that mundane explanation was totally wrong-headed?

  It's very obvious that the future is malleable – or, to put it another way, that at any particular moment in time there are numerous possible futures lying in wait for us. We tend to think of the passage of time, the movement of the moment that is "now" from the present into the future, as being much like the train on which I was currently sitting lost in speculation. A train can travel along just a single track – no way can it go along two tracks simultaneously. But I began to think – and I've believed it more and more as the decades have passed – that the passage of time isn't like that at all: the movement of the "now" is like that of the impossible train which can run on more than one track at once: on many tracks, on an almost infinitely large number of tracks. And I think it's open to us to decide which of those tracks we perceive the train to be running on. Over the past month or so I had opted – wittingly or unwittingly – to shift my perception of the track along which my own personal train was traveling. One of the many railway lines had been leading to a station that was the security of a career as a vet, and for over a decade that had been the only track I could see. But then had come my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo. Nothing in the physical universe had been changed by my experience of them – that would have been a ridiculous notion – but my perception had been altered, so that now the chief railway line I saw was the one leading to a station called Cinema Historian and Critic. I was still conscious that the other railway line was there, but I no longer perceived it.

  My mind explored this concept, and then took it further.

  Trains don't just go to stations, they come from them as well.

  Which implied that, all my life so far, I'd been perceiving only one of the many railway tracks along which my personal train – my own personal "now" – had been traveling. Had I somehow been possessed of the ability to perceive the totality of the passage of my past time, I'd have experienced not just a single past but many. In other words, if I could happily accept that the future was unformed and therefore malleable, then I must also accept the far more difficult proposition that the past, too, was readily malleable. It's an old cliché that we mold our own futures. Is it feasible that, through our selective perception, we can likewise mold our own pasts?

  If so, then there was another explanation for Andrew Brunner's omission of all those old World War II movies from his Brunner's Companion to the Cinema.

  They were movies that had never been made.

  Or, at least, they had never been made in the particular past which the consensus of the people alive in the world today had perceived, and indeed still perceived. Yet our train had been traveling along many lines at once, not just the one we'd noticed, and along one of those other lines it was perfectly plausible that the Allies had emerged victorious – perhaps the D-Day landings had been successful rather than a fiasco, or perhaps the traitor Oppenheimer's team had proved nuclear fission possible after all, rather than being misled by the nonsensical Jew science of the charlatan Einstein. I wasn't a historian, so I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess at these things. Whatever the details, it seemed to me that, just because we were able to perceive only a single past, we were getting a completely misleading picture of what the past had actually been like – we were regarding as simple something which had in fact been infernally complex, a huge number of different railway lines that knotted and unknotted as the history train sped along all of them at once. The past, in short, had been molded into its apparently immutable form not through any physical property of the universe but through the sheer inability of the human brain to perceive it fully.

  Those movies hadn't been made in our past, but they had been made in the past.

  Along at least one of the railway tracks of history, the victors in World War II had been the Allies, and their movie producers and directors had set about solidifying the past they preferred. Of course, they wouldn't have realized that this was what they were doing – they were merely making triumphal entertainments, just as our own moviemakers had created such propagandistic efforts as The Rising Sun Shall Never Set and Private Kohl's War and countless others you can certainly think of yourself – but that was the effect of what they did.

  How the movies had been brought into our present was something about which I could hardly even begin to guess. Perhaps there are some people who are able to perceive directly that the train of time i
s always running along more than a single track, and perhaps one of those people succeeded in, as it were, moving the cans of film across from one side of the train to the other. Or perhaps they just slipped accidentally from a different track, of the many that constitute the passage of time, onto ours. However it came about, the anonymous proprietor of the Rupolo – and perhaps his counterparts in numerous small, scruffy suburban cinemas all over the country – had realized they represented a way of altering people's perceptions, and thereby of changing the shape of history, of reifying a different past.

  And to a great extent it had worked – I knew that at first hand. Even to this day, whatever the evidence of my senses or my intellect, I know deep inside me that World War II was fought in black-and-white and that the winners were those slightly comical chappies with their strangled accents. At the time I was sitting on the train home and these notions were formulating themselves in my head, the knowledge was much stronger. Ever since I'd started going to the Monday matinees I'd been having those occasional but powerful flashes when the world around me seemed to be nothing but a charade, the powerful feeling that true reality was what I saw on the Rupolo's screen. Were my own experience to be repeated all over America or all over the world, to be shared by millions upon millions of others, then assuredly the consensus perception of which railway line the train had pounded along might change.

  And the past with it.

  The only reason the ploy had ultimately failed in my own instance was that I had begun to think of the movies analytically – it had been my conscious decision to continue watching them, but now on the basis that they were thrillingly verboten presentations. Had I continued to watch them uncritically, seeing them through the lens of my emotions rather than that of my intellect, I might have eventually come to see the world they depicted as the only possible past, the true history. No wonder the other Monday regulars at the Rupolo hadn't seemed disappointed by Private Kohl's War and The Rising Sun Shall Never Set. While I'd been watching those two ditchwater outings the rest of the audience had been watching something else – The Fall of Berlin, perhaps, or Convoy to Nairobi, or ... They'd seen those movies because there was no reason for them not to. I, on the other hand, had been able to see only movies that accorded with my own particular perception of the way the past had run. Along the railway track to which my perception was once more limited, the victors had made the movies that reinforced the consensual past.

  ~

  Whoever those conspirators were – if they even existed outside the bounds of my own fertile imagination – their scheme patently failed, and not because of the cops busting cinemas like the Rupolo all over the country but because in due course no human being can continue to observe and accept outside stimuli completely uncritically: eventually, as with myself, the analytical faculty must step in to limit the scope of the mind. For me to say that this self-limiting mechanism of the brain is a tragedy might seem rather rich, coming as that statement does from someone who has made a lifetime career – and a very great deal of money – out of deploying that very same analytical faculty. Yet I stick to the contention. Without a full perception of the true, complicated nature of our past we are not fully prepared as a species to tackle the equally complicated, multiply braided future that awaits us. We will forever be blind to the flowering of the simultaneous realities of our own future, instead perceiving only a single stalk, permitting ourselves to glance neither to left nor to right as we charge ahead oblivious to the splendors all around us. It is a sterile course we are following, this faith in our perception that there is only a single, unique future, and I believe that in due course it will lead to our extinction. If there are other species out there among the stars, I have no doubt they will have learned not to make the same mistake we've made and persist in making, and that they'll thereby be equipped to deal with the future: to welcome it as the burgeoning treasure-store it is in a way we are not. Perhaps only here, on this world, has the mistake ever been made.

  As for the movies themselves? As I've said, I am a rich man, and I've spent some of my wealth on employing researchers to try to track down those whose titles I can recall: Albert RN, The Great Escape, Reach for the Sky, The Bridge on the River Kwai ... But so far they've come up with nothing, and I doubt that now this will ever change. What I still think of as The Rupolo Movies were, if you like, just temporary visitors to our consensual and ever-evolving history; whether they'll ever come back – or be brought back – is something about which one can't guess. My suspicion is that we've seen the last of them.

  Every now and then I wonder what our consensual present would be like had we indeed been able to perceive a railway track along which one of the stations was the Allies winning World War II. Would things be so very much different? Would they be better or would they be worse? Again, who can guess?

  This particular version of history has been very good to me. I've led an extremely comfortable life doing more or less exactly what I wanted to do, indulging my own especial passion and being paid large sums of money simply to enjoy myself. And most of the time, as I look around at the rest of the world, everything there seems pretty near ideal as well. But sometimes I wonder.

  This week in the New York Times there was much reporting of the bloody suppression of yet another escape plot by the niggers in one of the slave camps of the South. Scores of them were shot or hanged, including children, and the ringleaders were roasted alive, as is the custom there. I am not one of those who would pretend that the niggers are anything other than a debased subspecies of humanity, but at the same time I cannot believe that this is right: I would not roast a dog or a cat alive, so how can it be right to do this to a nigger? The week before, two homosexuals were lynched in Massachusetts; that was considered to be such a routine occurrence that the story was given only a single paragraph tucked away at the bottom of page twelve. Again, can it be truly right to punish someone with death for their sexual preferences? To be sure, the law would have delivered them a jail sentence, which is certainly justified enough, but the tone of that single paragraph seemed to condone the actions of the lynch mob. I feel uneasy at the ease and frequency with which our penal system carries out executions, often of people who seem to me to be more mentally ill or impaired, or simply more independently minded, than genuinely criminal. And I wish that when vagrants are rounded up they did not simply disappear.

  So, yes, sometimes I wonder.

  The Glad who Sang a Mermaid in from the Probability Sea

  Sand between my toes and the songs of the seas in my ears. Two songs, two seas. The water sea belongs to me because it lives and dies with me, with its perfect blue (I made it perfect) sheening to the horizon and the pure white froth of its mighty yet playful breakers. The probability sea belongs to me as it belongs to all, and owns all, having birthed all.

  More song. Laughter-song. A mother. Her weans. The grave laughter-song of love.

  And the smell of seaweed in my nostrils, sparking a joyous hunger. I throw back my head and see that the sun fills its decreed place in the sky, and I roar my delight in my creation as I turn, stretching my arms wide to embrace.

  Oh, lady.

  Oh, weans.

  ~

  Once there was a ship that sailed the seas of The World. The ship was real – some friends once saw it sail – but now it has become in the Ironfolk mind like a myth, for all they know is that it had a name, and that it played an important part in ... something or other. That's what's been lost to them: what it was it did; why it was important. But its name is still remembered: the rusty little ferry was called the Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

  The Ironfolk revere names, though often they get them wrong.

  I slaved aboard a different vessel called the Ten Per Cent Extra Free, a vessel that sailed the probability sea. I was one of a hundred hundred slaves on a ship of crafted metal whose sleek lines and curved shine and unthinkable size – it was a month's walk from one end to the other – made a joke of its name. The joke, had th
e Ironfolk but realized it, was not on the dented ferry – of which they recalled so little – but on the great cargo vessel, for its presumption: it was one of many, and thereby unimportant; the ferry was one of one.

  I slaved, and like the other slaves I sometimes schemed for the overthrow of the Ironfolk, secure in the knowledge that our plans – however intricate and perfect – would never fruit; our plotting was an irresponsible sport, hardly more. We moved from system to system, picking up extra Finefolk slaves to replace those who died of pining or of beating. But, more important, we embarked Ironfolk families by the hundred; rich families and soft families, usually, but often with the look of defeat in their eyes. We were not allowed to go too close to them, for fear that we might steal their weans – as if we would wish to (although sometimes the weans fled to us, recognizing that the same light shone in us as shone in them). The families were leaving their homes and the crowding of the Galaxy, leaving to be taken to new and echoing worlds across the great ocean. The Spiral of Andromeda was beckoning them, flaunting its faded starry finery at them, promising – false-promising – that all was fresh and virginal there.

  The Ironfolk have a liking for virginity, believing it to be the natural order of things. This is one of the tapestry of beliefs that has always shielded their eyes from the reality of the universe. Virgin purity is something that must be created; reality is rough and promiscuous and noisy, with whisky on her breath. Andromeda herself was not like that, mind you: she was flashy and could be strident, but her mother had invented her as pure, and she remained that way all her days, shining as brightly as the stars of the spiral which bears her name. The most exquisite of her many sensualities was the dirt under her fingernails.

  The Spiral of Andromeda is absent from my sky. I have no wish always to see reminders of my time of slavery.