Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (11 page)

In my time, my history…

But not elsewhere, where they could still
die, continuing to suffer without oblivion; except that they
suffered only momentarily. Did they feel anything, somehow joined
to all their dying others in their degrees of guilt, if they felt
any, perhaps as a passing uneasiness of premonitions as they hiked
through the pass to their exile, dying in some and escaping in
others…

I thought of the hundred thousand or more
who had escaped to live out their lives when I saw the old couple
in the lobby the next morning, sitting with hands folded, with
their lost ones alive in their brains, waiting to be avenged
again…

Our guide was in the bar. I slid in next to
him in the booth and asked, “Tell me, are the bullets fired into
the past?”

“
They would have to be,” he
said, sipping his coffee out of a chipped porcelain cup decorated
with a mountain scene. There was a chip in the matching saucer.
“Into one kind of past,” he added.

“
Can we walk into it, the
past, I mean?”

“
Never really went that
far,” he said.

“
But if you let them walk
on toward you,” I said, “wouldn’t they walk into the
present?”

“
It never comes to that,”
he said, “since shots are fired before it can happen.”

He sipped some more, touching the chipped
part of the saucer.

“
You know,” I said, “that
you’ll run out of clients.”

“
Nearly so now,” he
said.

“
How long have you been at
this?”

“
A long time.”

“
And you know how it has to
end?”

“
Unless I find younger
clients. Grandchildren. I’ve been researching some.”

“
You checked on
me?”

“
No – you just walked in
with…that look on your face.”

“
But I don’t want to kill
anyone,” I said.

“
Keep looking,” he said,
“so you don’t miss your chance. All this may disappear one
day.”

“
And you’ll be out of
work,” I said.

He asked, “You do not wish to avenge
yourself?”

“
I don’t think
so.”

“
Even with that shadow on
your face?”

“
You have an interest in
seeing it.”

He gave me a hurt look. “Do you not imagine
it, do you not feel what you should do?”

“
I’m too far from feeling
the crimes,” I said, startled by the denial in my words.

“
But the dark…it comes for
you,” he said.

I asked, “What is it for you, only
money?”

He hesitated, then said, “I saw how some of
them wanted it, and it moved me when they came looking for leads
about the escapees and those who helped them, even as late as
twenty years ago. They’d pay anything, once they heard what I
knew.”

He had told them what they wanted to hear
and somehow staged the illusion, I insisted to myself as if waking
from a nightmare.

“
But how did you? It’s some
kind of trick.”

“
No, no, I found the
places. I walked out there one day and passed some people, but when
I stopped to look after them they were gone. Then I read an article
about the Nazi escape routes and recognized faces. I can’t explain
it all, except maybe by the way light splits…as in the stories I
read about quantum experiments.”

“
That’s it? Nothing
more…personal?”

He looked away from me and finished his
coffee, then put the cup down carefully on the saucer. It was
either something personal with him or just business; he didn’t want
to let on either way. “You’re still an observer today?” he
asked.

“
You want to start charging
me?”

He smiled. “Sooner or later.” He seemed to
know what I would think and what I would do.

There was no one in the pass that day. The
old couple sat down on a rock wall and waited, faces impassive as
if expecting the last judgment to sound. I looked at my guide and
tried to think why I was still here, seesawing when I should have
fled from what had to be, at every other moment, some kind of
charade. How many people had he hypnotized and brought here? How
many had simply lost interest? How often can you kill an enemy? A
time would have to come when no one would know enough history to
care.

The old couple did not look at me, but it
was as if they could hear my thoughts, and were content with my
presence. Their eyes had not met mine, not even once. How often had
the couple come out here?

I stayed at the hotel and struggled to
understand what I had seen – or what had been given for me to see.
My guide went out with new clients, and left me to myself. I
imagined that it was part of his plan, to set the hook as deeply as
possible.

I tried to think, if I could call it
thinking. My guide lived in the town as a bachelor, spending his
earnings on the local women. He was who he seemed to be, a man with
a job. But who was he?

I began to think it a mercy that the
escapees from the defeat of Nazi Germany might be dying along their
escape routes, repeatedly, endlessly, at the hands of witnessing
victims, now so much older than their tormentors.

From the mugshots, I still did not recognize
any of the fled thousands; any face in the rifle’s sights would do
as well; they all had the same resigned look.

Did anything spill over from one variation
to another, as a fear and expectation of death? What could it
matter if the fugitives had no idea of what was happening to
them?

Sudden death seemed too much mercy.

A bullet in the head was not enough; but
even dismemberment by a black hole would not be enough.

For Eichmann, better than the simple rope
that was still waiting for him in Jerusalem – in his future, my
past.

True, they escaped through the strangeness
of the passage – but what made them visible to us? Did we somehow
stir the quanta and pull ghosts out of ourselves?

Who was this guide? Who was I? A figment of
someone’s deranged imagination?

A pile-up of the past had made me, and it
was still there, crusted over, controlled by my denials.

One evening I thought of exposing the
delusions within myself, by commanding myself to awaken.

I gave the order near sleep, with no result,
but no result was itself a result.

I lay there, abandoned and contentedly
godless, but suddenly grateful that the quantum realm beneath
reality might offer provision for a true hell, in which the worst
of us had found eternal punishment, by being killed, eaten, and
digested without end by the eternal mill of existence, shaped into
shapeless monstrosities…

But they did not know it. How could they?
Did their killers know joy? Were they repeating their actions with
the hope of killing all the criminals? How could they know when it
was over? When the pass ran out of fugitives?

How could there be a conclusion?

One way to escape the pool of madness in
which I was drowning, I told myself, was to expose the fakery,
shadow my guide and discover the trick; it had to be a projection
of some kind, with confederates falling down in the rifle
sights.

Walk into Eichmann and his guide and
dissolve them.

I followed my guide around for a few days,
but found no evidence against what he claimed. He worked, partied,
and womanized.

Finally, I decided to walk right into one of
his masquerades – so I went out without him.

“
Are you a Jew?” Eichmann
asked me in the hot morning.

“
It doesn’t matter,” I
said, and stepped toward him on the path. “You killed many
others.”

“
Any of your family?” he
asked, smiling. “If they hang me a million times, it wouldn’t
satisfy…your kind.”

“
They will hang you, you
know,” I said.

“
Possibly. I sometimes
dream about it.”

I took a step closer, thinking that I had to
be talking to myself, because he was saying exactly what was
expected of him.

“
They’ll catch you,” I
said. “I know…that they did.”

In his future, long in my past, the Israeli
team was at work, with a submarine waiting off the coast of
Argentina; the trial and the 1962 hanging in Jerusalem repeated
itself, in one variant, and in an infinity of others; he could die
in Jerusalem, or here, as often as anyone who wished to kill him
would want.

But doing the same thing over and over, I
told myself, as if expecting a different result, was a good
description of illness. Yet here, I knew, no one expected a
different result, only repeated death, with always too little
suffering…

To kill your enemy was a mercy only to the
living.

I looked back along the way I had come, but
he was gone.

I met my guide’s car on the way back. The
old couple was with him, rifle on the old man’s back. They went
past without speaking to me. The guide seemed to know that I would
not want a ride back.

I walked on, thinking that the ground itself
had been shamed by the first escapees, and had marked itself across
the probabilities for all who would come, and see, and kill.

They fell yet they lived, as if promised by
some satanic redeemer never to die.

At breakfast my guide said, “You have still
not pulled a trigger on one of these…things.”

“
I don’t know which one
killed…my people. I was adopted by other survivors.”

“
Does it
matter?”

“
Killing is killing,” I
said, finishing my grapefruit.

“
So you live by
tautologies? These criminals are all still there, as many as we can
find, forever making their passage to the sea and to South America,
Canada, Mexico, and the United States, fleeing all human
conscience.”

“
I wish it was a finite
number.”

He smiled. “If so there will come a day when
they will all be dead.”

“
A hundred thousand or more
makes a lot of killing.”

“
Nothing compared to
theirs. Shoot any face you see. No difference.”

“
What good would it do
me?”

“
Try it.”

He seemed calm and convinced in his
advice.

“
And your fee from
me?”

“
No fee until you are
satisfied.”

I could just go away.

“
Who are you, really?” I
asked, feeling resentful. “This may all be nonsense in a way I
don’t understand.”

“
I may tell you,” he said,
“who I am.”

“
But you won’t, of course.
You learned all this by chance,” I said, “or you invented the whole
show somehow, and found…customers. How you do it makes no
sense.”

“
I don’t understand it
myself,” he said, “not being a physicist. But what happens is real,
so it must make sense even if you and I never know how.”

I looked into his face and could not speak.
Physicists spoke similarly about the utility of quantum theory. It
works, predicts, don’t ask how, get over it.

I left that day, no charge.

He had told me that he had inherited the
business from his father.

Some nights I dream that I am looking
through field glasses, which suddenly become a rifle sight’s
cross-hairs, and I see a mustached face, without which so many of
us would not have been born. A traumatically shocked corporal from
World War I had fathered a generation with his hatred…

I have revisited the passage in later years,
long after the guide had apparently died; no one at the hotel
remembered how, or even if he was dead. I walked the trail and
thought of taking up his job, but the resonances of the effect were
gone from that dusty trail.

Not enough customers in our variant.

But the monsters are still marching down
from the mountains, beyond our sight, spied by my guide and his
clients, forever dying in that knotted infinity, where I feel
myself pulling the trigger.

We can kill them all, I told myself, in
their various pasts, to at least deny them the lives they still
seek to live out in our history and elsewhere; in a sense it’s all
our history…

One hundred fifty thousand dead Nazis
suddenly seemed too small compared to millions of native Americans,
African slaves, Armenians, Jews and Palestinians, Poles, Gypsies,
Rwandans, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians. One hundred million dead in the
twentieth century’s wars and genocides. More wealth spent on
killing and preparations for killing than on any other activity.
Not to mention the countless who are dying from an ever poisoning
atmosphere of an increasingly violent geophysical catastrophe.

Guilty landscapes drift through our
presents, and those of us who do not repudiate the past make new
compacts with its crimes.

Are there any kinder presents?

I began to think of myself in the third
person. The “I” was to feel with, the “he” for thought, both of us
chance awarenesses, thrown off blindly from an indestructible
thing-in-itself, willing itself forward. The thinking “he” hoped
that the number of variants coming through the pass was in fact
finite. The old couple had not lived to find out one way or the
other, and could not have found out because endlessness cannot end;
but in a finite series there would come a day when no new figures
would appear on the trail, but any long time might just as well be
endless…

You will have killed them all, if you can
last long enough, “I” told myself.