Wednesday's Child (29 page)

49.

I still don’t know whether HE was God, and I have no regrets about my last words to HIM, but it turned out that the
Übermensch
wasn’t done with me yet.  Not only did I get no appreciation for anything I’d done, but my delirium, after I finally passed out, was plagued by guilt-induced nightmares, in which I had to atone for dying before accomplishing my mission.  Time was when I might have succumbed to that kind of bullshit, but I was wise to HIM now.  What could HE do to me?  Relegate me to one of the circles of Hell?

Not everyone thinks of Hell as a place of fire and brimstone, except maybe people who spent their last moments on Earth consumed by fire.  Others, people who lived their whole lives in Seattle, for example, might think Hell was a place that’s perpetually gray, cold, dank, and miserable.  If I thought that way I might have truly believed I was there when my head cleared.  I certainly felt miserable.  And cold.  And wet.  And alone.  And…now that I thought of it, there was a touch of brimstone.  Everything smelled like burned-over shit.  And it was really dark.

Actually, after weeks of unrelenting August heat, it wasn’t all that unpleasant, except for the throbbing pain in my pelvis.  I was a couple of inches from being a eunuch.

Since dead men don’t worry about having their balls shot off, I figured out about then that I was still alive.  In fact, I was still wearing my radiation suit.  Where the hell was I, anyway (no pun intended).  I tried moving my arms.  It felt like I was lying under a pile of litter, but so far, so good.  I tried wiping off my faceplate.  Ah, I could see again.

I unzipped my hood and pulled it up over my face.  Sky.  Stars.  Fresh air.  Well, not that fresh, the burned-over shit smell was stronger without my hood.

I may have been alive, but I wasn’t entirely well.  I have no idea how much time passed, but the next thing I remember was hearing a motor approaching.  Doors opened and closed, and I saw flashlight beams.  Then, people starting shouting, calling my name.  Somehow, I knew my throat wouldn’t work properly, so I struggled to sit up. 

A woman’s voice, “There!  He’s over there.”  And then she was running, slipping, falling, getting up, and running again until she dropped to her knees before me.  Henry was right behind her.  A minute later Rod was there getting all the smoky debris off me and shining a light on my once white suit.  

“Look,” he said, pointing at my bloody thigh.  He got his fingers in the bullet hole and tore at the fabric.  “He’s been shot.”  They laid me on my back.

Henry used his phone to call a Medivac, and then Ilene was there with tears streaming down her face in the filth and soot, with Gregg on one side of her and Marc on the other. 

“How did you know he’d be here, Mom?” Marc asked.  “I thought they searched all this yesterday.”

“They did,” she said, “but he wasn’t here yesterday.  He probably only got here an hour or two ago.” 

She silenced him with a finger pressed against his lips. “Just accept it for now.  He’ll explain it when he feels better.”

***

I awoke in a hospital bed for the second time in a month.  I lay there for a while thinking it all through, realizing what happened. 
Okay, I take it back. You’re not an asshole.

The bullet hadn’t caused fatal bleeding, and I’d flipped from Wednesday night to Friday morning before enough smoke and fumes worked their way through my air filters to kill me. They’d found me in the charred remains of Stoychko’s house at three a.m. after clean air above the rubble allowed me to assimilate enough oxygen to regain consciousness.

I’d wound up partially submerged in the char and soot pit that was left after the heat wave had finally broken with torrential rains that extinguished the flames and the fire department had soaked the glowing embers.  I’d been lying in a steady rain when they found me. Fortunately, I was adrift elsewhere in the space-time continuum when the house finally collapsed.

A monitor at the nurse’s station alerted her that I was awake, and a minute later they were all beside me again.  My throat was raw, but I could speak.

“Who figured it out first?”

“The fire hadn’t cooled enough to search through until Thursday morning,” Henry said.  “Just to be sure, we watched firefighters dig through the remains for hours, but Ilene knew you wouldn’t be there.  When they found the radioactive mass of concrete, she made us stay back and wouldn’t let anyone near the debris again until the searchers had radiation protection.  Then she refused to leave.  Your sons arrived, and we all had dinner.  Ilene said there was no point looking for you until after midnight; she wasn’t sure when, so we just drove out there and waited.”

“What about you two?” I nodded at him and Rod.  “I remember a lot of gunfire.”

“The State Police got there shortly after the house went up in flames.  Stoychko and Husam al Din are in jail.  Bushati and the others are dead,” he said.

“And everyone else lived happily ever after,” Rod said.

“How did the authorities react when you found me?”

“They don’t exactly know yet,” Ilene said.  “The feds handled the affair just like Union Station, so there was no media attention.  When we came back to find you it was just us.  The Medivac crew only knew you’d survived the fire; they had no idea who you were.  And when we got to the hospital Henry threw a national security cloak over everything and told the medical staff to do their jobs and not ask questions.”

“I told William and the rest of the team, this afternoon,” Henry said.  “I said there’d been a pocket of open space left in the basement under a couple of tons of debris that we’d been unable to search on Thursday, and that the collapsing joists had formed a kind of lean-to that protected you.”

“They bought that?”

“I promised them a full report on Monday, but I’m not surprised that they didn’t question it.  You’ve had this aura of unexplainable believability for over a month.  Why would it be any different now?  Sam compared it to a miraculous case of survival after a mine disaster.”

My sons still didn’t know the truth.  They’d been listening and processing everything, talking softly with each other out of earshot of everyone else.

“I’ve made a decision,” I said.  “I intend to go public with all this, once I figure out how to avoid getting committed to an asylum.  I’ll need your help.  I think I should start with William and the rest of the unit when I get out of here.  But first, if you guys will excuse me, Ilene and I need to talk to our sons.”

I didn’t anticipate a problem with Marc and Gregg.  I’d already explained what my life had turned into four times, and I now had compelling evidence to support my story.  Ilene, bless her, had thought ahead, and brought my laptop and the flash drives with the Union Station and Yankee Stadium attacks on them.  I had to remind myself that as far as the kids were concerned, the conversations I’d had with them on my Thursday night had never happened.

I started by showing them Union Station.

“What the hell is this?” Gregg said, “another movie about terrorism?”

“I downloaded this video live from the CNN website,” Ilene said.  “It’s real.  Just watch and listen.  You promised to let us present this our way.”

Next came the attack on Yankee Stadium. 

“That was real, too?” Marc asked.  “That’s why you called Wednesday and told us not to come?”

Ilene nodded and he looked at me.  “You knew it was going to happen ahead of time?  How?”  He shook his head in dismay.  “I don’t get it.  Did it happen or didn’t it?”

I smiled. “It happened, both attacks did – in
my
time line.  In yours, they didn’t.”

Gregg looked at his brother.  “This is going to be good.”

I started from the beginning and told it all to them.  Every so often they looked to Ilene for confirmation, and she responded with her version of events.  By the time they were done peppering me with questions, the nurse had come in to break us up.

“If you want him discharged tomorrow, get out of here and let him sleep.”

AFTERMATH

50.

Sunday night, I called William.  “I haven’t been very fair to you,” I told him. “I owe you an apology and an explanation.”

He murmured something unintelligible, then cleared his throat.  “I’m listening.”

“I’m ready to answer your questions. Full disclosure.  I can have Ilene drive me downtown tomorrow morning, and meet you in your office.  I know Henry’s supposed to give you a complete briefing.  He won’t mind if I preempt him, and after you hear what I have to say, you won’t need it.”

William would be a good test.  If I could convince him, I stood a good chance of completing the task the Übermensch had given me.  Gregg and Marc hadn’t found it too hard to suppress their disbelief, but they’d known me all their lives.  True, they’d suddenly learned I wasn’t who they thought I was, but they both had active imaginations and we had solid relationships based on trust.  Neither was true of William.

I described everything to him, leaving nothing out.  He listened intently, saying little, his quixotic temper nowhere in evidence.  Several times, when he seemed about to object or interrupt, his expression and body language told me he was mentally trying to force the square peg of my story into the round hole of an unresolved question he had, finding, to his surprise, that it fit.  My regard for him rose immensely.

The inevitable moment came when he stopped me and glared intimidatingly.  “Henry and Rod have both known for weeks?”

“Yes,” I said, at a loss for words.  I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or just intensely absorbed in what I was telling him.

“Don’t worry about it.  I get why you didn’t tell me, and your rapport with Henry clearly worked.”

When we got to the beginning of last week, he called Henry and Rod in and told them to close the door.  We discussed the rest together.  William was especially interested in the notes Henry and Rod had written to themselves on my Thursday evening.

“You didn’t question them when Dylan gave them to you, Wednesday morning?”

“I was anticipating something like that,” Henry said.  “We were confident, by Tuesday, that something was going to happen Thursday night. If Dylan had information to help us intercept them on Wednesday, we knew he’d show up here and share it with us.”

“What about both of you living Wednesday and Thursday twice?” William said, addressing Rod and Henry. “Dylan said the second time negates the first.  How does that work from your point of view?”

“First,” Rod said, “it’s not something we got to vote on.  It just happened, and not only to us, but to everyone except Dylan, including you. But only people like Ilene and us, whose lives were closely intertwined with his on those days, noticed.  Dylan says our dual timelines merged back together on Friday, like a river flowing around an island. For a while, because of our involvement with him, we had access to both sets of memories.

“Last week,” Henry said, “Rod and I spent our second Thursday evening in a restaurant with Ilene until very early Friday morning. After we recovered Dylan, we all retained the ghost memories, as we call them.  Since I was actually with Ilene and Dylan on the first Thursday evening, Ilene and I were able to reinforce our shared memories.  It was quite an experience.”

“And now?” William asked.

“I recall the ghost memories the way I know things that happened when I was three.  I don’t actually remember the details. I know them because my parents told me about them, and I know for a fact that I really was three, once.”

William’s questions were insightful.  He turned to me next.  “Tell me if I have this right.  For five consecutive weeks, you fell asleep on Wednesday night and awoke on Friday morning.  You passed out in that burning house last Wednesday night, close to midnight, then skipped ahead twenty-four hours to Friday morning, so you were only exposed to the toxic smoke for, what?  A couple of  hours?  Your suit’s air filters were enough to keep you alive, and from your perspective, you were rescued less than four hours after you were shot.”

“Right.”

“Then you knew it would happen that way?”

“At some level I suppose I did, but I didn’t think about it consciously.  I’m never certain of anything these days until it happens.

“Okay, what’s next?  Are you going to be our new secret weapon?”

Henry said, “He’s only effective on Wednesdays or Thursdays.  The rest of the time he’s the same old Dylan.”

“I actually had something else in mind,” I said.  “I want to go public.”

William frowned.  “I can think of a dozen reasons why that would be a bad idea.”

“So can I, but there’s one very good reason that outweighs all the bad ones.”

We spent an hour going over all the statements made by the President, several Senators, and numerous commentators and military leaders, on the days when the averted attacks on Union Station and Yankee Stadium actually occurred.

“Dylan saw it first,” Henry said.  “Starting with the original attack on the World Trade Towers in 1993, the whole country, probably including each of us, reacted with self-righteous anger, blood lust, and a thirst for revenge, whenever the terrorists did something spectacular.  It doesn’t matter that we were justified; in fact, that’s precisely what makes it so dangerous.”

William nodded his agreement.  “What’s your point?”

“Every time the attacks escalated, our national response got more extreme. We’ve gone from a nation that counseled war as a last resort, to one that initiates hostilities whenever our anger is aroused, and it’s not just the Administration.  After every act of terrorism, Americans wave the flag yelling, ‘Kill the bastards.’  At times like that an over-zealous President has a free hand. He might have started a nuclear war last week if we hadn’t stopped the attack from happening.  One of these days he will if we don’t change the way we address this.”

“There are too many nuclear weapons in the world,” Rod said, “and Israel’s not the only country that would use them preemptively.   India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea – and let’s not forget that only one nation has ever nuked another, and it wasn’t part of the Axis of Evil.”

“You believe that going public will change things in the future?  No offense, Dylan, but I didn’t think you were that naïve,” William said.

“It worked in the eighties.  The nuclear freeze movement started as a grass-roots thing that spread throughout the industrialized world, and eventually led to the SALT treaties.  You could make a similar case for the anti-Vietnam and anti-Iraq War demonstrations that destroyed the legacies of three powerful Presidents.”

William shook his head.  “I don’t buy it.  It’s a pipe dream.”

I hated to do it, but I’d expected it to come down to this.  “Do you believe in God, William?”

The question startled him, but he said, “You know I do.”

“We’ve discussed it before, so you know I’ve never had that kind of blind faith, but I accept yours.  Consider everything we showed you, today.  How do you explain it?”

“You think God directed your actions?” William asked, incredulous.

“I asked what you think.  How would you explain what I’m able to do?”

“Are both of you with him on this?” he asked Henry and Rod.

“Personally,” Rod said, “I’m an atheist.  Dylan is an agnostic, and Henry’s a pragmatist.  It doesn’t matter whether you call the entity that chose Dylan for this role God.  What matters is that whatever it is, compared to us it might as well be omnipotent.”

“The only thing I’m sure of,” William said to me, “is that if you go public, you’ll have to reveal things about both attacks that have been classified Top Secret.  You’ll be arrested for treason and crucified.” 

Notwithstanding my recent delirium, I doubted that.  “I can accept that risk.”

“Damn it, Dylan, every politician and industrialist whose power is enhanced by war and terror will go after you.  Churches and anti-religionists’ll both attack you.”

“Probably, but I won’t be alone.  My family will stand behind me.”

“He’ll have Rod and me, too,” Henry said.

“All I want is a public forum.  We can’t count on a super-being on a white horse saving us every time. We have to do it ourselves, but only the truth will empower people to make it happen.”

A light seemed to go on in William’s head.  “You expect me to help you?”

“Damn right,” Henry said.  “Look, William, no one’s asking you to put your head in a noose.  The Government decided the public is better off not knowing what almost happened, but people in power know, right up to the President, and I’m sure our allies do too.” 

“Certainly, Israel does,” Rod added.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.  “You knew, too, when you came in this morning, but after seeing it the way we showed it to you, do you still feel the same way?”

“Suppose I concede your point.  What then?”

“Then, I’d ask if our little presentation might not have the same effect on your superiors.  What if the whole country saw what we showed you?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You and Henry are heroes, today, William.  You both have a unique opportunity to get the ears of the people at the top of your respective food chains,” I said.  “Help us get a hearing with people who matter.  Get word to the FBI Director and the Homeland Security Secretary that urgent new information has come to light concerning the aborted attacks.  If you and Henry both tell them to listen, they will.  Get us a hearing.”

“What if I do and they throw us out on our collective ears?” 

I noted that he’d said, “Us.”

“Then we’ll have to find another way to spread the word.”

“They’ll kill you, Dylan.”

“I’ve been reading about Daniel Ellsberg.  People remember him as the man who blew the lid off the lies that three Administrations told about the Vietnam War.  What they don’t remember is that it was his status as an expert defense analyst committed to the Cold War that got him access to the
Pentagon Papers
in the first place. It was his realization that continuance of the Government’s policy could only lead to disaster for the country that motivated him to risk a conviction for espionage.”

I half expected William to ridicule me for comparing myself to Ellsberg, but instead, he said, “Ellsberg might have spent the rest of his life in prison if certain people hadn’t been stupid enough to burglarize his psychiatrist’s office, trying to discredit him.  You might not be so lucky.  The power boys have become a lot more sophisticated at destroying their enemies since then.  If you don’t wind up in jail you’ll be branded a crackpot along with every other lunatic who preaches Armageddon.”

“You could be right, William.  But the question is still on the table: will you help us?”