Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  [The reading voice fades out as the sound of the airplane's engine cuts in. The camera shifts to images of clashing protestors waving Japanese flags and Chinese flags, some of the flags on fire . . . Then the voice fades in again.]

  Many inside and outside Japan objected to the testimonies by the surviving members of Unit 731: the men are old, they point out, with failing memories; they may be seeking attention; they may be mentally ill; they may have been brainwashed by the Chinese Communists. Reliance on oral testimony alone is an unwise way to construct a solid historical case. To the Chinese this sounded like more of the same excuses issued by the deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese atrocities.

  Year after year, history grew as a wall between the two peoples.

  [The camera switches to a montage of pictures of Evan Wei and Akemi Kirino throughout their lives. In the first pictures, they smile for the camera. In later pictures, Kirino's face is tired, withdrawn, impassive. Wei's face is defiant, angry, and then full of despair.]

  Evan Wei, a young Chinese-American specialist on Heian Japan, and Akemi Kirino, a Japanese-American experimental physicist, did not seem like the kind of revolutionary figures who would bring the world to the brink of war. But history has a way of mocking our expectations.

  If lack of evidence was the issue, they had a way to provide irrefutable evidence: you could watch history as it occurred, like a play.

  The governments of the world went into a frenzy. While Wei sent relatives of the victims of Unit 731 into the past to bear witness to the horrors committed in the operating rooms and prison cells of Pingfang, China and Japan waged a bitter war in courts and in front of cameras, staking out their rival claims to the past. The United States was reluctantly drawn into the fight, and, citing national security reasons, finally shut down Wei's machine when he unveiled plans to investigate the truth of America's alleged use of biological weapons (possibly derived from Unit 731's research) during the Korean War.

  Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World—victim groups around the world lined up and demanded use of the machine, some out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power, others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well, the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated when the implications became clear: did the French wish to relive the depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese want to reexperience the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind their Empire?

  With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up jurisdiction of the past. Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to deal with the past just yet.

  Wei wrote, "All written history shares one goal: to bring a coherent narrative to a set of historical facts. For far too long we have been mired in controversy over facts. Time travel will make truth as accessible as looking outside the window."

  But Wei did not help his case by sending large numbers of Chinese relatives of Unit 731 victims, rather than professional historians, through his machine. (Though it is also fair to ask if things really would have turned out differently had he sent more professional historians. Perhaps accusations would still have been made that the visions were mere fabrications of the machine or historians partisan to his cause.) In any event, the relatives, being untrained observers, did not make great witnesses. They failed to correctly answer observational questions posed by skeptics ("Did the Japanese doctors wear uniforms with breast pockets?" "How many prisoners in total were in the compound at that time?") They did not understand the Japanese they heard on their trips. Their rhetoric had the unfortunate habit of echoing that of their distrusted government. Their accounts contained minor discrepancies between one retelling and the next. Moreover, as they broke down on camera, their emotional testimonies simply added to the skeptics' charge that Wei was more interested in emotional catharsis rather than historical inquiry.

  The criticisms outraged Wei. A great atrocity had occurred in Pingfang, and it was being willfully forgotten by the world through a cover-up. Because China's government was despised, the world was countenancing Japan's denial. Debates over whether the doctors vivisected all or only some of the victims without use of anesthesia, whether most of the victims were political prisoners, innocent villagers caught on raids, or common criminals, whether the use of babies and infants in experiments was known to Ishii, and so forth, seemed to him beside the point. That the questioners would focus on inconsequential details of the uniform of the Japanese doctors as a way to discredit his witnesses did not seem to him to deserve a response.

  As he continued the trips to the past, other historians who saw the promise of the technology objected. History, as it turned out, was a limited resource, and each of Wei's trips took out a chunk of the past that could never be replaced. He was riddling the past with holes like Swiss cheese. Like early archaeologists who destroyed entire sites as they sought a few precious artifacts, thereby consigning valuable information about the past to oblivion, Wei was destroying the very history that he was trying to save.

  When Wei jumped onto the tracks in front of a Boston subway train last Friday, he was undoubtedly haunted by the past. Perhaps he was also despondent over the unintended boost his work had given to the forces of denial. Seeking to end controversy in history, he succeeded only in causing more of it. Seeking to give voice to the victims of a great injustice, he succeeded only in silencing some of them forever.

  Akemi Kirino:

  [Dr. Kirino speaks to us from in front of Evan Wei's grave. In the bright May sunlight of New England, the dark shadows beneath her eyes make her seem older, more frail.]

  I've kept only one secret from Evan. Well, actually two.

  The first is my grandfather. He died before Evan and I met. I never took Evan to visit his grave, which is in California. I just told him that it wasn't something I wanted to share with him, and I never told Evan his name.

  The second is a trip I took to the past, the only one I've ever taken personally. We were in Pingfang at the time, and I went to July 9, 1941. I knew the layout of the place pretty well from the descriptions and the maps, and I avoided the prison cells and the laboratories. I went to the building that housed the command center.

  I looked around until I found the office for the Director of Pathology Studies. The Director was inside. He was a very handsome man: tall, slim, and he held his back very straight. He was writing a letter. I knew he was 32, which was the same age as mine at that time.

  I looked over his shoulder at the letter he was writing. He had beautiful calligraphy.

  I have now finally settled into my work routine, and things are going well. Manchukuo is a very beautiful place. The sorghum fields spread out as far as the eye can see, like an ocean. The street vendors here make wonderful tofu from fresh soybeans, which smells delicious. Not quite as good as the Japanese tofu, but very good nonetheless.

  You will like Harbin. Now that the Russians are gone, the streets of Harbin are a harmonious patchwork of the five races: the Chinese, Manchus, Mongolians, and Koreans bow as our beloved Japanese soldiers and colonists pass by, grateful for the liberation and wealth we have brought to this beautiful land. It has taken a decade to pacify this place and eliminate the Communist bandits, who are but an occasional and minor nuisance now. Most of the Chinese are very docile and safe.

  But all that I really can think about these days when I am not working are you and Naoko. It is for her sake that you and I are apart. It is for her sake and the sake of her generation that we make our sacrifices. I am sad that I will miss her first birthday, but it gladdens my heart to see the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere blossom in this remote but rich hinterland. Here, you truly feel that our Japan is the light of Asia, her salvation.

/>   Take heart, my dear, and smile. All our sacrifices today will mean that one day, Naoko and her children will see Asia take its rightful place in the world, freed from the yoke of the European killers and robbers who now trample over her and desecrate her beauty. We will celebrate together when we finally chase the British out of Hong Kong and Singapore.

  Red sea of sorghum

  Fragrant bowls of crushed soybeans

  I see only you

  And her, our treasure

  Now, if only you were here.

  This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once before, as a little girl. It was one of my mother's treasured possessions, and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.

  "He was very proud of his literary learning," my mother had said. "He always closed his letters with a tanka."

  By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia. Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name. He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers were very dextrous— the legacy of being a good surgeon.

  I watched my grandfather finish his letter and fold it. I followed him out of the office to his lab. He was getting ready for an experiment, his notebook and instruments laid out neatly along the workbench.

  He called to one of the medical assistants. He asked the assistant to bring him something for the experiment. The assistants returned about ten minutes later, holding a bloody mess on a tray, like a dish of steaming tofu. It was a human brain, still warm from the body from which it was taken that I could see the heat rising from it.

  "Very good," my grandfather nodded. "Very fresh. This will do."

  Akemi Kirino:

  There have been times when I wished Evan weren't Chinese, just as there have been times when I wished I weren't Japanese. But these are moments of passing weakness. I don't mean them. We are born into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to complain about our luck.

  Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I've never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin.

  The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that's part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather's time, committed great evil.

  In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It's easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal?

  Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

  Why didn't I tell Evan about my grandfather? I don't know. I suppose I was a coward. I was afraid that he might feel that something in me would be tainted, a corruption of blood. Because I could not then find a way to empathize with my grandfather, I was afraid that Evan could not empathize with me. I kept my grandfather's story to myself, and so I locked away a part of myself from my husband. There were times when I thought I would go to the grave with my secret, and so erase forever my grandfather's story.

  I regret it, now that Evan is dead. He deserved to know his wife whole, complete, and I should have trusted him rather than silenced my grandfather's story, which is also my story. Evan died believing that by unearthing more stories, he caused people to doubt their truth. But he was wrong. The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.

  This urge to speak, to tell the story, I share with the aging and dying former members of Unit 731, with the descendants of the victims, with all the untold horrors of history. The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.

  [Dr. Kirino's voice comes to us off-camera, as the camera pans to the star-studded sky.]

  It has been a decade since Evan's death, and the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium remains in place. We still do not know quite what to do with a past that is transparently accessible, a past that will not be silenced or forgotten. For now, we hesitate.

  Evan died thinking that he had sacrificed the memory of the Unit 731 victims and permanently erased the traces that their truth left in our world, all for nought, but he was wrong. He was forgetting that even with the Bohm-Kirino particles gone, the actual photons forming the images of those moments of unbearable suffering and quiet heroism are still out there, traveling as a sphere of light into the void of space.

  Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.

  For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.

  THE CARPET BEDS OF SUTRO PARK

  Kage Baker

  I had been watching her for years.

  Her mother used to bring her, when she was a child. Thin irritable woman dragging her offspring by the hand. "Kristy Ann! For God's sake, come on!" The mother would stop to light a cigarette or chat with a neighbor encountered on the paths, and the little girl would sidle away to stare at the old well house, or pet the stone lions.

  Later she came alone, a tall adolescent with a sketchpad under her arm. She'd spend hours wandering under the big cypress trees, or leaning on the battlements where the statues used to be, staring out to sea. Her sweater was thin. She'd shiver in the fog.

  I remember when the statues used to be there. Spring and Winter and Prometheus and all the rest of them, and Sutro's house that rose behind them on the parapet. I sat here then and I could see his observatory tower lifting above the trees. Turning my head I could see the spire of the Flower Conservatory. All gone now. Doesn't matter. I recorded them. As I record everything. My memory goes back a long way . . .

  I remember my parents fighting. He wanted to go off to the gold fields. She screamed at him to go, then. He left, swearing. I think she must have died not long after. I remember being a little older and playing among the deserted ships, where they sat abandoned on the waterfront by crews who had gone hunting for gold. Sometimes people fed me. A lady noticed that I was alone and invited me to come live with her.

  She took me into her house and there were strange things in it, things that shouldn't have been there in 1851: bo
xes that spoke and flameless lamps. She told me she was from the future. Her job was saving things from Time. She said she was immortal, and asked me if I'd like to be immortal too. I said I guessed I would.

  I was taken to a hospital and they did a lot of surgery on me to make me like them. Had it worked, I'd have been an immortal genius.

  The immortal part worked but the Cognitive Enhancement Procedure was a disaster. I woke up and couldn't talk to anyone, was frightened to death of people talking to me, because I could see all possible outcomes to any conversation and couldn't process any of them and it was too much, too much. I had to avoid looking into their eyes. I focused on anything else to calm myself: books, music, pictures.

  My new guardians were very disappointed. They put me through years of therapy, without results. They spoke over my head.

  What the fuck do we do with him now? He can't function as an operative.

  Should we put him in storage?

  No; the Company spent too much money on him.

  Gentlemen, please; Ezra's intelligent, he can hear you, you know, he understands—

  You could always send him out as a camera. Let him wander around recording the city. There'll be a lot of demand for historic images after 2125.

  He could do that! My therapist sounded eager. Give him a structured schedule, exact routes to take, a case officer willing to work with his limitations—

  So I was put to work. I crossed and recrossed the city with open eyes, watching everything. I was a bee collecting the pollen of my time, bringing it back to be stored away as future honey. The sounds and images went straight from my sensory receptors to a receiver at Company HQ. I had a room in the basement at the Company HQ, to which I came back every night. I had Gleason, my case officer. I had my routes. I had my rules.