The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (34 page)

Vincent, there, immediately.

“Harry?” His lips are cracked, his skin is pale. “Harry, can you hear me?”

“Vincent?”

“Do you know where you are?”

As he talks, he checks my vitals, carefully, effectively. He, like most ouroborans, has had some medical training. My vitals are not good, but this Harry August mustn’t know that.

“Hospital?” I suggest.

“That’s right–that’s good. Do you know what day it is?”

“No.”

“You’ve been asleep for two days. You were in an accident. Do you remember that?”

“The… quantum mirror,” I breathed. “What happened?”

“You saved my life,” he replied softly. “You got me out of the room, told me to run, closed the door. You saved a lot of lives.”

“Oh. Good.” I tried to lift my head, and felt pain run up my back. “What happened to me?”

“You were caught in the blast. If I’d been any closer I would have been… but it was mostly you. You’re still in one piece, which is a miracle, but there are some… some things the doctor will need to discuss with you.”

“Radiation,” I wheezed.

“There was… there was a lot of radiation. I don’t know how it… But that doesn’t matter now.”

Doesn’t it? That’s new.

“You OK?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m fine.”

“You look a little pale.”

“I… I got a lot of radiation too, but you were… You saved my life, Harry.” He kept coming back to this, incredulity in his voice. “Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“How about a pay rise?”

A little laugh. “Don’t get cocky.”

“I’m going to die?” I asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, I gave a small nod. “Right. How long?”

“Harry…”

“How long?”

“Radiation sickness… it’s not pretty.”

“Never seen myself bald,” I admitted. “Did you…? Are you…?”

“I’m still waiting on test results.”

No, you’re not, Vincent. “I hope it’s… I hope you’re OK.”

“You saved me,” he repeated. “That’s all that matters.”

Radiation sickness.

It’s not pretty.

You will be experiencing the worst of it, as you read this. Your hair will be long gone, and the nausea will largely have passed to be replaced by the continual pain of your joints swelling up and internal organs shutting down, flooding your body with toxins. Your skin will be peppered with ugly lesions, which your body is incapable of healing, and as the condition progresses you will start drowning in your own bodily fluids as your lungs break down. I know, because this is precisely what my body is doing, even as I write this for you, Vincent, my last living will and testament. You have, at most, a few days to live. I have a few hours.

“Stay with me,” I said.

Vincent stayed.

After a while the nurses brought another bed in for him. I didn’t comment on the drips they plugged into his veins as he lay down beside me until, seeing my stare, he smiled and said, “Just a precaution.”

“You’re a liar, Vincent Rankis.”

“I’m sorry you think so, Harry August.”

In a way, the nausea was worse than the pain. Pain can be drowned, but nausea eats through even the most delicious opiates and cutting chemicals. I lay in my bed and tried not to cry out until at last, at three in the morning, I rolled on to my side and puked up into the bucket on the floor, and shook and sobbed and clutched my belly and gasped for air.

Vincent slipped out of his bed at once, coming over, entirely
ignoring the bucket of puke at his feet, and with hands on my shoulders held me and said, “What can I do?”

I stayed curled up in a bundle, knees tucked to my chest. It seemed the least uncomfortable position I could assume. Vomit ran down my chin in thick, sticky bands. Vincent got a tissue and a cup of water and wiped it off my face. “What can I do?” he repeated urgently.

“Stay with me,” I replied.

“Of course. Always.”

The next day the nausea began for him. He hid it well, sneaking out of the room to puke up in the toilet, but I hardly needed nine hundred years of experience to see. In the night the pain began to take him too, and this time I staggered out of the bed to hold him, as he puked and retched into a bucket on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he gasped between shudders. “I’ll be fine.”

“See?” I murmured. “Told you you’re a liar.”

“Harry,” his voice was acid-eaten, ragged between breaths, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”

“Was it ‘Sorry for being a damn liar’?”

“Yes.” I didn’t know if he sobbed or laughed the word. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK.” I sighed. “I know why you did it.”

The lesions, as they broke on my skin, didn’t hurt so much as itch. They were a slow splitting, a gentle peeling away of flesh. Vincent was still going through nausea, but as my body began to break down, the pain grew intense again, and I screamed out for comfort and morphine. They dosed us both, perhaps considering it rude to only fill up one patient, least of all the one who wasn’t paying for this extensive medical care. That evening a box arrived for Vincent. He crawled out of bed and unlocked the padlock on the front, pulling from the inside of the box a crown of wires and electrodes. With shaking hands, he held it out towards me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It… it will make you f-forget,” he stammered, laying it down on the end of my bed as if it was a little too heavy for his tastes. “It will… it will take away everything. Everything you are,
everything you… It will take away this memory. Do you understand?”

“What about me?” I asked. “Will it take away me?”

“Yes.”

“Bloody stupid then, isn’t it?”

“I… I’m so sorry. If you knew… if you knew some of the things…”

“Vincent, I’m not in a confessional mood. Whatever it is, I forgive you, and let’s leave it at that.”

He left it at that, but the box with its crown of wires stayed in the room. He would have to use it on me, I concluded, before I died, and before he grew too weak to operate it.

In the night we were both in pain.

“It’s OK,” I told him. “It’s OK. We were trying to make something better.”

He was shaking, at the limits of his pain meds, and still in pain.

Tell me a story, I said, to distract in this hour of need. Here, I’ll begin. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scot walk into a bar…

For God’s sake, Harry, he said, don’t make me laugh.

Then I’ll tell you a story–a true story–and you tell me one in reply.

Fair enough, he answered, and so I did.

I told him of growing up in Leeds, of the bullies at the school, of B+ grades and the tedium of studying law.

He told me of his wealthy father, a good man, a kind man, entirely under his son’s thumb.

I spoke of trips on to the moor, of flowers in spring and the heather by the side of the railway lines which caught fire in summer and burned down to a black crisp as far as the eye could see.

He spoke of a garden with rhododendron bushes in it, and the whooping of the whistles from the trains on the other side of the hill.

Was this southern England?

Yes, just outside London.

I told him about my adopted parents, and how they were more
to me than my biological father, wherever he was, whoever he was. How I wished I had the courage to say, You are everything, and he is nothing, and it was not the food on my plate, nor the roof over my head, but that you never let me down which makes you my father, my mother.

He said, “Harry?”

His voice was choking with pain.

“Yes?”

“I… I want to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“My name… my name is Vincent Benton. The gardener’s name is Rankis. I hid my true name because… I am twenty-five years old. I am seven hundred and ninety-four. My father is Howard Benton, my mother is Ursula. I never knew my mother. She dies when I am just a child. I am born at home, on 3 October 1925. Apparently the nanny fainted when I popped out. I’ve never told anyone this in my entire life. No one.”

“I am who I am,” I replied. “That’s all.”

“No,” he answered, levering himself out of bed. “You’re not.”

So saying, he unlocked the box with its crown of wires and eased it on to my head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I cannot accept this life,” he replied. “I cannot accept it. I cannot. I just wanted someone to understand.”

“Vincent…”

I tried to struggle but had no strength and little inclination. He patted my hands away, pressed the electrodes into my skull. “I’m sorry, Harry.” He was weeping. “If you knew what I have done to you, if you could only understand… I’ll find you, do you understand? I’ll find you and keep you safe, no matter what happens.” The whirr of a machine charging, the fizzle of electricity.

“Vincent, wait, I’m not—”

Too late.

I was alone when I woke after the Forgetting and, as had been the case before and would be the case, I believe, no matter what was done to my mind, I was still myself.

Still in hospital.

Still dying.

My bed had been moved, or perhaps Vincent’s had been moved. The crown of wires had been tidied away, and I floated now in a warm painkiller glow, my flesh bandaged up against its own gradual shedding.

I lay there a while, contemplating nothing at all. Still at last. A thoughtless, wordless silence. After a while I stood up. My legs gave way immediately. My feet were bandaged, as were my hands, and there was no strength in the swollen redness of my knees. I crawled to the door and managed to make my way out into the corridor. A nurse found me, crying out in shock to see me in such a state, and got a porter with a wheelchair, who helped me sit up.

“I’m discharging myself,” I said firmly.

“Mr August, your condition—”

“I’m dying,” I replied. “I only have a couple of days left to live. I am discharging myself and there’s nothing you can do to prevent
me. I will sign any document you like to rid of you liability in this regard, but you’d better get it fast because in the next five minutes I am gone.”

“Mr August…”

“Four minutes fifty seconds!”

“You can’t…”

“I can. And you will not stop me. Where’s the nearest phone?”

They tried to stop me–not with force, but with words, wheedling, dire warnings as to the consequences. I resisted them all, and from the phone at the doctors’ station called Akinleye. This done, I wheeled myself out of the hospital, still in my hospital gown, and into the warm summer’s air of the street. The sun was setting, brilliant orange-red over the mountains, and the air smelled of cut grass. People lurched back from me in horror, at my skin, at my falling hair, at my bloody robe where the lesions were beginning to leak, at my expression of wonder and delight as I headed downhill, letting the brakes go flying off as I sped towards the horizon.

Akinleye met me on the edge of town, in a small red Volkswagen. I’d had her in the area of Vincent’s facility for months, waiting for my call, and now as I rolled my way towards her she got out of the driver’s seat and said, “You look awful.”

“Dying!” I replied brightly, crawling into the passenger seat. “I need every painkiller you have.”

“I have a lot.”

“Good. Take me to a hotel.”

She took me to a hotel.

Gave me every painkiller she had.

“Pen, paper.”

“Harry, your hands…”

“Pen, paper!”

Pen and paper were provided.

I tried writing and got nowhere. My hands were, as Akinleye pointed out, not in a very useful state.

“All right, typewriter.”

“Harry!”

“Akinleye,” I said firmly, “in less than a week I will be dead, and it’s a chemical cocktail miracle that I have any conscious faculties as it is. Get me a typewriter.”

She got me a typewriter and pumped me full of every chemical our combined medical knowledge could think of, to keep me both lucid and sane.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now if you’d be so kind as to leave me enough morphine to fell an elephant and to wait outside, that would be appreciated.”

“Harry…”

“Thank you,” I repeated. “I’ll visit in the next life.”

When she was gone, I sat down before the machine and considered carefully my words.

In time, as the sun finally vanished beneath the horizon, I wrote:

I am writing this for you.

My enemy.

My friend.

You know, already, you must know.

You have lost.

Vincent.

This is my will and testament. My confession, if you will. My victory, my apology. These are the last words I will write in this life, for already I can feel the end coming to this body, as the end always comes. Soon I will lay all this aside, take the syringe Akinleye has left behind, and stop the pain from carrying on any more. I have told you all this, the passage of my life, as much to force myself to action as for your enlightenment. I know that in this I put myself entirely in your power, reveal every aspect of my being, of the many beings I have pretended to be in the course of this, and of whatever being it is I have become. To protect myself after this confession, I now have no choice but to destroy you
utterly and the knowledge you have possessed of me. I force myself to action.

By now, you will have discovered I am missing from the hospital.

Fear will have gripped your belly, a fear that the Forgetting did not work, that I am fled.

And perhaps a deeper fear, for you are into the art of deducing all things. Perhaps you have deduced from my absence that more than just a fear of dying has caused my departure. Perhaps you have realised from my sanity after you attached your little machine that the last machine you attached did not work, nor the machine before that. Perhaps you see unfolding before you, as neutrons spreading in a chain reaction, the whole course of these events, every lie, every deceit, every cruelty, every betrayal, unravelling like an atom before the eye of God. Perhaps you know already what it is I have to say to you, though I do not yet think you can believe it.

You will send men to find me, and with little difficulty they will indeed stumble on my corpse. Akinleye will be gone, her work done for this day. As well as the empty needle, they will find these words and bring them to you, I trust, in the hospital. Your eye will scan this page and with my very first words you will know–you will
know
as you already must know, as you can no longer deny in the pit of your belly, that you have lost.

You have lost.

And in another life, a life yet to come, a seven-year-old boy will walk down a lane beyond south London with a cardboard box in his hand. He will stop before a house whose gardens smell of rhododendrons and hear the whistle of a passing train. A father and a mother will be in that place. His name is Howard, hers is Ursula. Their gardener, who keeps the flowers so fragrant, goes by the name of Rankis.

This seven-year-old child will approach these strangers and, with the innocence of youth, offer them something from his cardboard box. An apple, maybe, or an orange. A caramel sweet, a piece of sticky toffee pudding–the detail is not important, for
who would refuse a gift from such an innocent child? The father, the mother, maybe even the gardener too, for caution is not for such events, each will take something from the boy, and thank him, and eat it as he turns and walks away up the lane.

I promise the poison will be quick.

And Vincent Rankis will never be born.

And all will be as it should.

Time will continue.

The Clubs will spread their fingers across the aeons, and nothing will change.

We will not be gods, you or I.

We will not look into that mirror.

Instead, for those few days you have left, you are mortal at last.