Dear Winter,

Stop it.

Thanks,
lilly

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 5 of 5

Reader, this is it: the end.

I wish I could tell you all about the lives of Perlez and Dean after the “completion” of their mission, all of the side streets they walked down, all the houses they entered. I wish I could tell you who they loved and hated, because this might give us some hope of understanding what they did, and through that, the world they made, which is the world that made us. Some may contest that point, but I stand behind it. Even if only through inaction and failure, they are responsible.

Sadly, little is known about their lives after they left that apartment. The only real stipulation that the future placed on them was that they must report the details of their mission, which each man fulfilled dutifully. Sealed in the time capsule buried at the assigned location near Hof, the scientists of the future would pull out twin reports from Perlez and Dean. Each man had written his own separate account of the journey to Braunau and what transpired there, and from those reports, this record has been extrapolated. I do not know if either man read the report of the other, but I rather doubt it.

However, this is not all that was found in the capsule. Perlez did include an additional report that covered some additional ground, sketching in details of his post-Braunau life while directly addressing the future. It is a curious report, to put it mildly, and many dismiss it as the ravings of a disturbed mind. This is a gross oversight, I believe. Perlez has much to tell us, if we care to listen. Granted, the veracity of it all cannot be assured, but we really have no reason to believe anything these men wrote in their reports is true. Who is to say the mental state of Perlez was any more stable when he wrote the first report than when he wrote the second. Few like to admit this, but the two men could very easily be making excuses for their failures, rather than presenting an accurate and true representation of their mission.

We cannot turn to the records or the history books to confirm what happened to either man. Neither seems to have made a trace on the historical record. They are writing to us from oblivion, the white void between the lines where millions of peasants and proletarians have lived and died without even leaving a corpse in the bone yard that is the historical record. Perhaps we cannot trust Perlez and Dean, but have we even earned their trust? They may have no use for the future, but it is clear that the future has no use for them as well.

The second report was written in the same hand that wrote the first, and there is little change in the handwriting, though the quality of the pen seems to have improved measurably between the writing of the two. But the second report is clearly the messier of the two. The first is quite clean--no crossed out words, few spelling errors. I suspect it is a final draft of an early version. Undoubtedly, both men chose their words carefully when telling us what had happened.

Perlez’s second report is written more like a draft. Many words are crossed out, usually scribbled until all that remains is a dark cloud of black ink, hovering over some blithe word on the line below. Sometimes, extra words and half-sentences are written in the margins with arrows drawn to where they go on the line. It seems likely that Perlez wrote it, and then revised it, censoring himself in places, shifting the tone in others, correcting the most embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors without paying particular concern to the scattershot structure of the whole report. The messiness is often cited as evidence of Perlez’s disturbed state as he wrote this report, as if it were nothing more than feverish ranting. This, I believe, is pure nonsense. Would a lunatic bother to fix the spelling of “embarrassed” (missing an r, and then crossed out and spelled correctly)? Would a disturbed man change the following sentence, “He never understood the consequences of his inaction,” to “He never quite grasped the consequences of his inaction”? The first displays a certainty of tone undercut by the second, which suggests “he” at least tried to fathom the consequences, even if only to fail in the end. There is a softening of tone, a grammatical diplomacy, that suggests self-questioning on the part of Perlez--hardly characteristic of a disturbed mind, which does not gain perspective, as these revisions suggest, but rather loses it.

Still, it is hard not to question how the messy document got into the time capsule. It seems like a work in progress, but if Perlez were unable to finish it, then how did it wind up in the capsule? Presumably, he was the only one with knowledge of the capsule, outside of Dean (who was already dead when the second report was written). One can reasonably assume that someone else--perhaps entrusted by Perlez--placed the report in the capsule after Perlez was unable to finish his work, either through illness or death. The questions that such a scenario raises, however, are troubling and impossible to answer. How did this knowledge affect the person? Were they aware of what they were being asked to do? Did they act upon this knowledge in a way that somehow altered the future?

The other prospect--and I believe this one to be the most likely--is that Perlez simply grew tired of revising the second report and buried it, along with whatever lingering self-recriminations he may have had about the mission and his life. Dwelling on these matters can be difficult enough for objective observers, but to have been an active participant in this story and then find yourself going over and over the details to try and understand what went wrong is probably too much for any man to bear. I imagine he simply put down his pen and walked away from it, and the report supports such an interpretation.

Perlez covers much of his life story in the report, albeit only in a summary fashion. There seem to be large swaths of years that he is uncomfortable describing, and at several points, he alludes to substance abuse while not offering details. The years directly after leaving Braunau are particularly grim, and Perlez dispatches them with a simple phrase: “I wandered.”

But where? And what did he do? We must keep in mind that every step they took in the past was potentially destructive, always displacing something that would have been undisturbed otherwise. This was treated as one of the acceptable risks of the mission: so long as neither man procreated (and it was assured they could not) or killed, then the only significant change they could produce was the prevention of World War II.

But in those first few years, Perlez was certainly distraught enough to behave recklessly, if not monstrously. Poring over newspaper records of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Germany and Austria, scholars often point out traces of Perlez. “Ether addict attacks police officer, runs away unapprehended” is one headline that often appears when people make the argument that Perlez somehow wandered onto the stage of history, however briefly, during these years.

After almost a decade of wandering, he found himself at Hof, and he remembered the location of the time capsule. On an instinct, he went to the spot and searched. He found it, and inside was Dean’s report, sealed for posterity.

The existence of this report seemed to stabilize Perlez’s sense of duty, long adrift on a narcotic sea. Or perhaps it was simply the memory of his colleague, and the thought that he was still out there, existing somehow despite his dread of this time. Something seemed to shift in Perlez at this point, and while the man is quite unable to articulate the epiphany in the hobbled mixture of diary and scientific prose that makes up the second report, there is no doubt that the epiphany occurred.

The next few years were spent living around Hof, with the first year spent writing his mission report. Remarkably, given the distance of more than ten years from the actual events, Perlez is extremely articulate and precise in his recollection of events. It is possible that distance favoured reflection, or maybe the lost decade simply disappeared from his memory so that the events in Braunau were as vivid as last week. Or maybe, as the single defining purpose of his life, it is only reasonable that Perlez would not lose these events to the fog of memory. “I have spent the last decade trying to avoid these events,” he wrote, “but it seems I will always live each of these days over and over. It is not that I cannot forget; forgetting was easily bought. It is just that I cannot remember. When I think upon them, they seem to be happening now. I remember the present. I live the past.” These words are taken from the first report, which, curiously enough, is regarded as the more mentally balanced of the two reports written by Perlez.

The rest of the years in Hof were spent doing carpentry, the profession he had picked up a decade before and then abandoned. He described these years as peaceful, if lonely.

When the First World War could be seen skulking on the horizon, Perlez made the wise decision of absconding to Switzerland before anyone knew what was happening. For a man in his position, there seemed little other choice. If he stayed in Germany, he could have easily found himself conscripted into fighting. Even if he avoided the frontlines and found a quiet spot in the countryside to hide out the war, there was always the danger of the battlefield finding him at some point and forcing upon him the choice that was not a choice: defend himself or die.

The years in exile were hardly happy for Perlez. He immediately missed the stability of his home near Hof, the tranquil life he had earned through years of disquiet. Switzerland was filled with exiles during those years, but even amongst the displaced and dispossessed, Perlez did not find equals. There is a vast difference between being exiled from a place and being exiled from a time. There was only one man who was Perlez’s equal, his twin, and he had abandoned that man long ago. “If Dean were here,” Perlez wrote of the rooming house he stayed at for several years, “he would have hated this room, with its abominable clutter and oppressive sense of decoration. It reminds me of the future.”

When the war was over, Perlez returned to Hof once more, a place as battered as any other in Germany. He recognized some faces in the town, but everyone seemed to have aged ten years, not just four, even as he felt to have not aged at all. It was like time travel once again. Or was this how everyone experienced time in this era, not as a tangible, quantifiable object that was bought and sold, bottled and stored, but rather as a state akin to waking from a dream? That time was the epiphany in which you stopped living but for a moment in order to tabulate all that you had lost and gained?

If so, Perlez could not yet bring himself to make these calculations. He became the town drunkard, a sop to the inferiority of others. Sure, we are all wretches, the townspeople could say, but at least we are not that wretched. And then they could point at this staggering fool of a man, who fell down in the street, too drunk to walk, and say, that is the worst of us, secure in the knowledge that as long as he existed, no one could point at them and utter those words. And as they sneered fondly at him, Perlez all the while contained all the thoughts of their destruction and salvation behind a wall of alcohol. If they knew what he knew, would they only hate him more?

When Dean returned, Perlez at first thought it was a hallucination, just another guilty thought to torment him. But it was the real thing, returned to Hof for reasons quite unclear at first. He had bought a cottage on the outskirts of town after having worked in Spain for many years. In his diligence and thrift, he had saved up enough money to retire and quietly watch the tragedy of the century play out.

But why Hof? Dean would not respond clearly to these questions, although perhaps he did not have a clear answer himself. It seemed like the only natural place to end his days.

All of this autumnal talk confused Perlez at first. But it was only as he looked at Dean with a sober mind that he realized how much the man had aged, and therefore, he himself had aged. “I started crying the first time I realized it was 1926,” Perlez writes at one point in the second report. The phrase begs the question: was there a second time he realized it was 1926? A third? How many times did he need to realize this before it finally stuck?

That year was a particularly hard one for Perlez, as he began drying out. He stayed at Dean’s cottage, his body ravaged by shakes and hallucinations. The wind outside the house made a hideous music at night, like pigs squealing in a barn. Whenever the wind died for a second, it was as if a pig’s throat had been slit. But others always rose up to take its place. He would tell Dean to turn off the record and the man never had a response that could still the terror Perlez felt at this noise. They both suffered through the nights.

However, Perlez did make it past these difficult first steps and achieved something resembling balance once more. He seemed more humble, frailer, but he felt that perhaps this fragility was his true state, and if he embraced it, he would live longer than if he hid it. Like so many other things in his life, this was mere theory, and the execution would prove difficult, if not impossible.

After recovering sufficiently, he left the cottage, unwilling to burden Dean anymore. The man protested perfunctorily, but with little passion. Perlez sensed that his colleague had helped out of a basic sense of duty, and that to stay any longer would be a gross exploitation of the man’s decency. Once Perlez had sobered up, he could not shake the feeling that whatever bond had existed between them decades ago was gone. What existed now was simply the obligation towards that bond, and not the thing itself. But more significantly, both men knew that there was no one else on the planet with whom they could relax the tension in their shoulders, that aching in their spine, for just one moment.

Perlez went back to work, doing labour on an assembly line at a car factory in town. The people around him were half his age, and they rarely interacted with him. They went out drinking on weekends, married their pregnant girlfriends, complained about inflation. They lived their lives and he his own, and if the two were to ever intersect, both would be set on fire by the collision.

He rarely saw Dean during the late twenties, save for a shared meal a couple of times a year. Neither really had much to say, and at this point, all they could do was enjoy the relief of silence in each other’s company. They both were well aware of the world around them and what was happening in Berlin, but neither ever brought it up when they were together.

By 1929, Perlez had retired from the factory, eking out a meagre pension in his senior years. He lived in a run-down apartment filled with other impoverished elders and poor students and addicts. For all of the grinding demoralization of this poverty, he at least never lacked entertainment. There was always something happening on the street whenever he looked out the window, always a soap opera playing whenever he put his ear to the wall.

It was late in 1929 when Perlez realized that Dean was ill. With months passing between visits, it was increasingly evident that the health of Dean was fading. Had Perlez seen his colleague every day, the deterioration might have been imperceptible, but every time he saw Dean, the man seemed to lose weight and appear more pale. But still, he said nothing, merely noting how Dean barely ate, just pushed food around the plate and took a few bites.

The next time he visited Dean early in 1930, Perlez was shocked by how enfeebled his colleague had become. When he knocked at the door, he waited for what seemed like an eternity, only to find Dean slow and bent, barely lifting his feet as he walked. But there was still food on the table, a small, meagre meal, yet still hot and steaming.

“You’re ill,” Perlez accused.

“Yes,” Dean replied and sat down at the table.

“What’s wrong?” Perlez did not sit.

Dean shrugged.

“Can you even eat anymore?”

At first, Dean hesitated, perhaps hoping to somehow bluff his way through this, but he seemed to relinquish that illusion, finally speaking, “No, not really.” He added, “Mostly liquids, I can manage. But I don’t really bother with solids anymore.”

“You’re wasting away.”

Dean smiled. “We all go some way.”

Perlez’s expression was horrified. “But haven’t you tried to eat, are you just giving up?”

The muscles in Dean’s face shifted, and Perlez was struck by how long it took his colleague to change expressions, as if even that was now a huge burden on his weakened constitution. After a while, Dean’s face reconstituted itself into a picture of irritation. “Of course I’ve tried,” he said. “I just can’t anymore.”

“Cancer,” Perlez said, mostly to himself, “it must be cancer.”

“I don’t care what it is.”

“It’s cancer.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence fell between the two men. The food was cooling in its bowl--a thin broth, it appeared to Perlez.

“You should leave,” Dean declared.

Perlez looked at his colleague, amazed. His voice started to crack as he spoke. “I can’t leave you in this state. It isn’t right.”

“Why not? I’ve made all my preparations. Everything taken care of. All that I have left to do is pass the time.”

“Everything?” Perlez felt himself helpless for a moment, lost in the fact that this had been occurring all along while he had been ignorant of what was happening.

Dean looked down at his bowl, which was clean and empty. “There is one thing, I was hoping....”

His voice trailed off for a moment. The thought seemed to strain him. “Can you ask them to erase our names?”

“What? Who?”

“Whoever writes these things, whoever keeps the records,” Dean said dismissively. “I don’t know. I just want my name to be wiped out from the record.”

“They can’t just make us not exist.”

Dean sighed. “I know. I know they can’t pretend we never left. I know we can’t ask the whole world to forget that, but still....” Dean’s voice was quiet. “I just want to be forgotten. They can talk about two men that went back. They can talk about what we did. I just want my name erased. I want them to forget I ever existed.”

Perlez stared down at his colleague, who would not meet his eyes. Dean just gazed into the empty bowl, and Perlez wondered if the man could still eat, and had simply grown weary of it, had simply decided to cease existing. But that didn’t make sense. And the request, cruel as it was, did make sense.

“I will,” Perlez said. “I’ll write it down and put it in the capsule.”

Dean looked up and his face slowly contorted into a smile, lips held tightly shut, eyes cloudy but not raining. “Thank you.”

“Let them forget,” Perlez said with an air of bravura that sounded false to him, even though Dean seemed to appreciate it.

The two men shook hands and Perlez left, not quite understanding what was happening. It seemed to him that Dean was choosing death and oblivion, not simply succumbing to them, but actively choosing these things that you spend your lifetime running away from, only to come full circle in the end and fall down exhausted in their arms anyway. If this was not suicide, then what was it?

But the more he thought about it, the more he felt unable to deny the request. Ultimately, he was powerless over what the future did with them, but he had to make the request. In fact, he could feel the same temptation that Dean must surely be feeling--to become a person outside of history, with no past and no future, just a moment that exists and is perceived and experienced and then gone.

And so the second report contains Perlez’s request on the behalf of Dean, that the future erase all record of their births, their deaths, their names, their entire lives. Dean’s parents might have had three children once, a boy and two girls. Now, whoever they are, they have two children. Sometimes, if someone asks Dean’s mother if she wishes she had a son, her eyes grow wet and she doesn’t know what to say, and the person asking the question changes the subject awkwardly, not really understanding what he said or did to provoke such a response.

Of course, the memories of those who knew Dean and Perlez cannot be erased. But all written record of their lives has been destroyed. The collective memory of both men has been destroyed, leaving only private memories, which shall die soon enough. The names, reader, are my own creation, for the simplicity of telling the tale, and that is all. Whatever the real names might be, it seems that they have been successfully erased. I could find no record of them, and I did search quite hard.

All we have left of Perlez and Dean are their reports, which form an incomplete history of their lives. But they can no longer be connected with their own lives. Whoever they are, they have been set free from their own story. Sadly, their actions (and the consequences of these actions) cannot be erased, but they have been granted immunity. Perhaps Dean decided they had suffered enough for their failure. I see no reason to argue the point.

The reader may rightly wonder what happened to the two men? Obviously, the story is incomplete and must remain that way. We do know that Dean died at some point in 1930, not long after the aforementioned encounter between him and Perlez. Apparently, Perlez did not see him again after he left the cottage.

The second report seems to have been written shortly after Dean’s death. The cottage and all of Dean’s worldly wealth was left to Perlez, who writes that he moved in with some hesitation, not wanting to take the place of a dead man. A natural response, but the pragmatic concerns of his own poverty overrode such petty superstitions.

There is little in the final pages of the second report that elaborate on Perlez’s mental state in the aftermath of Dean’s death. Was he gripped by despair at being finally and completely alone in his time? Or did he feel a sense of relief at the prospect of being unknown, a stranger who no one would ever know the truth about? Surely, there is a sense of freedom, even as there is sadness, in Perlez’s position at this point.

Nor do we know how long he lived. Did he see the rise of Hitler? The beginning of the Second World War? The concentration camps? Did he smile and nod knowingly throughout all the conversations, biting his tongue? It is hard to imagine how he or anyone could tolerate such a life. To live powerless before that terror is horrible, but how awful to experience it as Perlez surely must have--as the direct consequence of your life.

The second report ends with regret; Perlez was undoubtedly aware of the deprivations that would come to him if he lived long enough. He writes, “I often speculate why someone did not go to the spot where capsule was supposed to be buried once the mission had been approved to go ahead. Surely there must have been a curious soul eager to see the results of the mission before it began? Children still find their Christmas presents before Christmas morning. Curiosity is not dead.

“Maybe we were simply blind. Or maybe we knew what we would find and so we simply ignored it, just for the sake of allowing ourselves the opportunity to knowingly fly headlong into failure and then act surprised afterwards, as if we never expected that wall to be there. We knew it all along. Someone out there must be reading these words now, seeing my face on the news as I talk blithely about our good intentions and the braveness of this experiment. Whoever you are, why didn’t you try to stop me? What froze you in your place? That is the question I ask myself. That is the question that destroys me.

“Is it too much to wish that someone had grabbed me by the collar and shouted in my face, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go?”

Reader, I hope you will take these words to heart.

I realize you cannot take this story at face value. How could anyone? Obviously, the story cannot be entirely accurate, given the complications of its subject matter and the large gaps in the source material. I have done my best, but I regret there have been omissions. In many cases, my own speculations had to fill the gap, although I feel my imagination stayed truer to events than mere reality ever could.

When I began, I said this was not a warning, and I stand by those words. This was not intended to simply cause alarm. All I wanted to do was spread this knowledge and hope that it might somehow pass around until finally finding a brain in which it could take root. I do agree with Perlez--there must have been someone who read the contents of the capsule before he and Dean left for the past, and that person must have chosen to remain silent. I hope this knowledge passes through the years and reaches a mouth that can speak at the right time.

Of course, I doubt that is the case. If someone did stop the mission, then these words would not exist; in writing them, I only confirm that I am failure too. And yet I write, just as Perlez pleaded for someone to tell him to stay behind. And like Perlez and Dean, I stand now outside of time, outside of history. I, like them, have walked off the page, if only to better see the book itself.

I think I understand why the person who read the capsule did not act. How could they possibly act in such a situation? Having read the contents of the capsule, they knew that the mission did go forward, and they did nothing to prevent it. What an awful form of self-knowledge, to understand that you fail your life by living it.

But how can you live your life like that, frozen by a knowledge that you cannot change the future or the past? Perlez and Dean had to go back into the past. I had to write these words. You had to read them. But I hope, dear reader, you shall do me the courtesy of acting surprised. In this mess of time we have created, that may be the only human decency left between us.

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 4 of 5

The next morning, Dean awoke first and brought up two bowls of porridge from the elderly couple, who often made a large pot of the stuff for their tenants each morning. They were very laid back as landlords, preferring to let the tenants live their lives as they saw fit, but the couple still felt enough of a paternal instinct to make sure everyone went out into the day well fed.

Dean placed the bowls on the table, one in front of his chair and the other in front of Perlez’s. He walked over to his colleague’s bedroom door and then walked away, sitting down at the table and beginning to eat his breakfast.

As he was finishing, Perlez opened his door. He seemed less dishevelled than he had been last night, although his face was still quite obviously bruised in places. Without saying anything, he sat and began to eat. Dean noted the slowness in his walk, the way he seemed to be favouring his left leg. While Perlez’s head was down over the bowl, Dean stared at the marks on his colleague’s face, trying to fathom the meaning of a bruise, the significance of a cut. And whenever Perlez looked up, Dean looked away.

Perlez was the first to speak. “I’ve decided on what we should do.”

He continued eating, as if that were all Dean needed to know. Finally, Dean spoke up. “Yes, and--?”

“Oh,” Perlez said, “you want to know?”

“Yes,” Dean replied, ignoring the insult.

Perlez dropped his spoon into the empty bowl. It rattled like dropping a bolt into an engine. “We’ll use ether. We’ll knock out the wife while the husband is at work and operate on the child.”

“When should we do it?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll get the ether today. You’ll perform the operation.”

“Really?” Dean was flustered. “So soon? Should we monitor them, see when the best time is?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

“But what if he doesn’t go to work? Where does he even work? Are there others in the house we have to watch for? A maid? The landlords?”

“We’ll get it done.”

Dean almost fell into a sulk. “Is it really that easy? Is that all there is to it?”

Perlez got up and gathered together both bowls. “Go to work,” his voice sounded almost compassionate for a moment, the brittle anger of moments earlier dropping away. “Just forget about it until tomorrow.”

“Are you going to work?”

Perlez was already on his way out of the room with the empty bowls in his hands when Dean asked him this question. He paused before the door and shook his head, but did not speak.

Watching his colleague leave the room, Dean wanted to shout out so many questions. What happened last night? What happened to your face? What happened to you? But he couldn’t speak. The door shut and the room was empty, save for his presence, which barely seemed to register. When Perlez walked, his feet were driven by an urge to punch holes in the floor. His hands touched the furniture as if they had a will of their own, smearing graffiti patterns on the dust that lightly coated everything. The air seemed to move around him like a jumpy animal.

Dean’s presence was less severe. His feet glided across the floor. The chairs did not creak when he sat in them. He sank into his bed so that it appeared no one was sleeping in it at all. When Dean was in the room, it was empty.

He waited for a few minutes, assuming Perlez would return, but he didn’t. When he realized this, Dean went to the window and looked outside. He could see Perlez walking down the street, getting smaller and smaller until he eventually disappeared. Dean waited until he could no longer see his colleague and then he also left the room. But there was no one who saw him disappear.

***

Walking up the steps to the apartment, Perlez felt the bottle of ether rattling in his pocket. The chemist had not asked any questions, which was perhaps for the best, as he would have only received lies in response.

This was a strange sensation for Perlez, and it weighed heavily on him. Did these people not see his guilt-ridden face, his eyes burning like a stove? They seared. Was this sort of shame so common that people thought nothing of it as it walked past them on the street, movements deformed by the mass of secrets sloshing about their stomach, a salty sea that threw them off-balance?

His landlord had greeted him on the landing and he had said hello, spoken brightly and innocuously about the fine weather. But what did this man know about his tenants? And if he knew it all and still did not care? Such thoughts disturbed Perlez.

It was with dread that Perlez opened the door to the apartment. He did not want to think of Dean sitting there, waiting for him, watching the door, expecting Perlez to come in and set the world right. Even though Dean seemed convinced that he had made the transition into the world of the past, Perlez knew better. The man had simply collapsed inwardly--the delusions that had originally let loose from his mouth like ecstatic religious visions had become internalized, a church in the place of belief, structure in the place of spontaneity. Perlez almost began to miss those early days when Dean seemed to collapse, momentarily lose his identity and become lost in his own skin. At least, he had seemed more alive in such a state than he was now--wearied by the mission, wearied by the world. What did he see when he stared at Perlez? What did he do in the apartment when he was alone? Of course, if Dean had collapsed, then Perlez had exploded.

The apartment was empty when he entered. He kicked off his shoes and heard them clatter against the wall. But the bottle of ether still seemed louder, rubbing against the fabric of his coat, the contents swirling, a restless sea, the disquiet of slumber.

He sat at the table and waited. I can wait too, he thought, but minutes later, he was standing again, looking out the window. What is going on out there? What are they doing? Some people from the pub across the street sang a song together. It sounded ridiculous, but he liked the noise anyway. When Dean entered, Perlez was still staring out the window.

“Did you get it?” Dean asked.

“Yes,” Perlez replied. His voice still had that harsh edge. How can I dull this blade, he thought. Should I? He couldn’t even figure out the right question anymore.

“So, tomorrow is the day,” Dean declared awkwardly.

“Don’t talk about it,” Perlez said. He tried to control his voice, which made it sound only more cruel. “Don’t think about it. I don’t want to hear a thing about it until tomorrow. The plan is simple, and we will carry it out without a problem. Let’s just forget about it for today.”

“I’m fine with that.” Dean took off his coat and shoes and placed them neatly beside the door. He always folded his coat and put it on top of the shoes, which struck Perlez as one of the most irrational, senseless things he had ever seen. The sight of it always filled him with contempt for the man, and he could never quite understand why.

“Are you hungry?” Dean asked.

“Yes,” Perlez said. He took the ether out of his pocket, slammed it on the table, and walked out the door.

***

Stunned by the finality of Perlez’s response, Dean did not really know what to do with himself for a moment. He just stood there, limp and confused, a pointless man. After all that they had been through, where was the closeness? Did tribulation not bond people together? Or did it simply tie people together against their wills, and when it had passed, all that remained was a contemptuous unity?

After getting some bread and cheese from the kitchen downstairs, Dean sat back down and tried to eat, even though his stomach felt like it would crawl out through his throat. The impurities of this nineteenth century food did not help matters. He tried to avoid sentimental thoughts of the future, but it was hard to resist when imagining the flurry of dirty hands labouring over every morsel he put in mouth--hands of sweat, hands of dirt, hands of shit. People talked of the care of the personal touch, but what of the carelessness?

All he could do was sit at the table and stare at the bottle of ether. The bottle was glass, and the clear liquid could have been water. He almost wanted to drink it.

Staring at the bottle was just too overwhelming. It seemed like an intruder in the room that could not be acknowledged, but was still undoubtedly there. Feeling sick to his stomach, Dean left the room.

The sky was darkening as he left the inn, walking down the cobbled streets of the town. He so rarely wandered the town that he wasn’t quite sure where to go. What did the people do? What did Perlez do? He was probably in a pub somewhere, drinking and eating and laughing, maybe getting into a fight. Slowly, Perlez would turn into a thing of brutish physicality, all appetite and action. But what it suggested about the mission was more terrifying than anything else. For if the men of the future could so easily succumb to the violence of this epoch, then what exactly were they doing there? Who were they curing?

Dean looked into the pubs and taverns, never entering, but always watching from across the street. He passed the Harrow, which had its main window boarded up, but at the King’s Head, he could see Perlez eating alone at a table.

It was easy to watch without being observed. Perlez was so intent on his food that he did not even look up to see Dean across the street, staring in fascination and repulsion. There were chicken legs and potatoes and beans, with chunks of bread on the side. Perlez ate with a fork in one hand, swirling the beans into the mashed potatoes and then sticking a glob of food into his mouth. Sometimes a small piece fell back onto the plate before it could get in his mouth; the fork was piled so high that bits of food would be knocked off the fork by his lip, like someone riding on top of a train going under a low bridge. The difference was that Perlez always returned for whatever did not make it through the first time. The train never did.

In his other hand, he held a drumstick, which he would tear at with his teeth. The meat seemed tough, but he was not deterred. If anything, the stubbornness of this meat seemed to provoke his carnivorous instinct, and he practically attacked the dead animal, gnawing at it while his face betrayed neither pleasure nor happiness. This was not for culinary enjoyment; it was for survival. A job like any other, joylessly mandatory.

Dean realized how foolish he must have looked standing there. Perhaps people would just take him for a beggar engaging in the vicarious thrill of watching others eat. Perhaps they assumed he was simple-minded, just a fool standing on the street corner captivated by the sights and smells of the pub. He walked away, disquieted by the sight of Perlez eating and unable to watch anymore.

Back at the apartment, he put his shoes by the door and folded his coat neatly on top of them. The bottle of ether was still there. The apartment belonged to it now. Dean was the intruder.

He went into his room and shut the door, unable to face the thought of seeing Perlez again that night, the man’s face dripping with gravy, flecked with potato, like a beast fresh with viscera from the kill. In fact, he thought for a moment of taking a whiff of the ether--just a whiff--and letting it carry him off into a strange dream like life, but more vivid. He resisted this urge, and after an hour or so--during which Perlez did not return--he at last negotiated a truce with sleep.

***

The next morning, Perlez awoke to the sunlight clawing at his eyes. His head ached and his mouth seemed unusually dry. Another wretched day in a dead century, he thought. He sat up and his head gave another throb. He drank half the dirty water in his washbasin and the other half he used to soak his head. Gasping, he pulled his face out of the water. And then he dunked it back under, as if there were a hand behind his head pushing him under until he talked. But he had nothing to say, and didn’t know what he could say that would make a difference.

He wiped his face and caught his breath, feeling somehow refreshed by trying to drown himself. After dressing, he opened the door to his bedroom and saw Dean sitting at the table, eating a bowl of porridge. A bowl sat in front of his chair, still warm and steaming. Dean did not look up.

“Good morning,” Perlez said, sitting down. The ether bottle was between them.

“Good morning.” Dean looked up at his colleague and then quickly looked back down, as if fearing to provoke anger.

Usually, when people hunched over their food like Dean did, it was because they were ravenously hungry and needed to be closer to the food, if only to speed up its consumption by the removal of a few unnecessary centimetres of space. But Dean ate laboriously, slowly, measuring out each spoonful, staring down at the bowl between each swallow as if he had to contemplate whether or not he would continue with this act. The pair ate in silence, both finishing at the same time.

“When do we leave?” Dean asked.

“Now,” Perlez replied.

“Do you think he’ll be gone already?”

“Probably not, but we can just watch for him to leave.”

Dean just nodded at this, but did not say anything. He went into his room and retrieved the surgical kit. Perlez already had his shoes on, and had to wait for Dean to put his shoes and coat on. With the bottle of ether in Perlez’s coat pocket and the surgical kit in Dean’s, the two men left the apartment for the waking world outside.

Outside of the Hitler apartment, the two men waited. Perlez directed Dean to an alleyway where the man could wait unobtrusively, while he would simply walk around the block. It seemed less suspicious than two men waiting together, although both would have admitted that the people seemed to have little interest in them. Everyone who passed them were preoccupied with their jobs, their families, what to do after work that day, a stray word the wife had say on the way out the door, what could she have meant, “Don’t forget like last time,” what was the last time? Such people barely noticed the two sweating, anxious men wandering the streets, staring at each face as if it were an accuser.

Perlez began walking around the street, passing out of sight and going around the next street before coming full circle in front of the Hitler resident. On the third pass, Dean flagged him over.

“Alois left.”

Perlez didn’t say anything. He just looked Dean in the eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the man--he had no choice but to trust him--it’s just that he worried about his resolve sometimes. But those eyes seemed so curiously calm, the calmest he had seen them in months. Like that time in the village after the falling out with Cuyler, when Perlez found Dean sitting outside the town. He sometimes forgot, but Perlez knew that Dean had a source of resolve that he could not tap, could not even begin to guess at the source.

They walked into the house without even pausing at the door. Perlez led the way inside, and once they shut the door, they paused to make sure they did not run into someone. The sound of two people talking could be heard from behind a door, so they moved quietly up the stairs to the top floor.

At the door, Perlez whispered to Dean, “Hold her down.” A light flared in Dean’s eyes, a sudden flash of disgust, perhaps, at the coldness of the phrase.

The two walked inside--did no one believe in locks yet? They would soon learn--and headed straight through the apartment, not even bothering to mask the sound of their steps.

“Alois?” a woman’s voice called, and the two headed towards it.

When they entered the bedroom, the woman was lying on her bed, propped up with a pillow. She did not scream, but simply looked at Perlez and Dean with confused eyes. When Perlez strode towards her and pushed the ether-soaked rag to her face, she finally gasped and grabbed his hands. Her feet started to kick and Dean threw himself on them. She struggled, but Perlez would not budge, and his grip seemed to hardened--one hand behind her head, the other tight to her face. After a while, she became limp and slumped back in her bed. Hesitantly, Perlez loosened his grip and laid her back down. She breathed slowly, and for a moment, it was the only sound that could be heard in the room.

“The child,” Perlez said, pointing at a cradle next to the bed.

Its eyes were shut, and somehow, it seemed to have slept through the whole incident without a cry. Occasionally, it let out a small grunt as it shifted, straining against its unformed body, which did not seem capable of meeting the demands of its tiny will. Delicately, Perlez put the rag in front of the child’s nose, fluttering it just above the nostrils. Its eyes flared open and then slowly shut again, but in that brief in-between moment, the child seemed enraged about being pulled from its blissful natural rest into an unnatural sleep made by man.

Dean pulled the surgical kit out of his coat--it was a small metal case, and someone from the era might have mistaken it for a flask on first glance. He opened it up and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Everything inside was sterile, the knife, the suturing materials, the prosthetic testicle--all of it clean and ready. The prosthetic, in particular, was quite sophisticated, used by all the eunuchs in the future and designed for life-long implantation without any negative side effects.

As Dean operated, Perlez sat on the bed and watched the woman. She breathed steadily, but not very quickly. Had he given her too much? For a moment, that fear would grip him, but then she would breathe in slowly, as if merely sipping the air, tasting it hesitantly. He tried counting between her breaths, watching to see if somehow--though this defied reason--the breaths might actually be coming farther and farther apart. In his nervousness, he realized he was messing up the count.

“Oh no,” Dean said, and he was so startled that he did not shout out these words. They cowered from his mouth, beaten dogs, the wind taken out of them.

Perlez turned and saw Dean holding the prosthetic in his hand. His face betrayed total helplessness. He looked like he might cry.

“He has two,” Dean said. “He already has two.”

“What?” Perlez asked.

“Look,” Dean said, stepping back.

Perlez could see that his colleague spoke the truth. In her bed, the woman stirred, her eyes still shut. Her mouth opened slightly and a bubble of air escaped through her teeth.

“We need to leave,” Perlez declared, standing up. “Gather your things. Leave everything as it was. The mission is completed.”

Dean looked at his colleague, stunned, but he didn’t speak.

The two left the apartment quietly, careful not to displace a thing. The woman would likely remember what had happened, but what could she say? Two men had drugged her and then done nothing to her, done nothing to the apartment, done nothing to the child? For a few years, the question might nag at her: what had they done then? When her husband was not around and the children were at school, she might feel the weight of incident come crashing down on her, a sudden flash of horror that stole her breath. But she would always recover. Nothing, she could say to herself, nothing had happened. Twenty years from now, it would seem like a bad dream. In her final years, she might think of this moment and wonder, why was the dream so vivid? What had been the source of the anxiety that had caused such a peculiar vision? She could rationalize an answer that would give her some peace, but no one could say what it might be.

Perlez and Dean wandered down the street, hurrying back home to the apartment, neither man able to speak because of course once the words started, there was no stopping what needed to be said. It wasn’t until they were safely inside their own apartment that they began to speak again.

“What happened?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know.” Perlez put the ether in his room and came back out. “I think things might have changed.”

“Changed? How?”

“Or maybe we were always misinformed. We don’t know how accurate historical records are.”

Dean sat in his chair, still wearing his coat and shoes as if he might have to suddenly flee. “But what does this mean?”

“It means the mission is complete.”

“We don’t know that,” Dean countered in his quiet, wounded voice.

“We have to work with that assumption.”

“But what if he had two all along, and he still started the war? What if nothing changed, and the theory was simply wrong all along?”

Perlez breathed deeply and let out a sigh. His chest heaved with emotion and the sigh cracked. “There is nothing more we can do.”

“You’re right,” Dean said, face in his hands. “You’re right, you’re right.”

Perez’s voice grew weaker, softer. “I am.”

The two were silent a moment, Perlez staring out the window, Dean watching the wall.

“I suppose we should be leaving,” Perlez said suddenly.

“Yes, I suppose,” Dean agreed, though there was obviously regret in his tone. “Where will we go?”

Perlez didn’t respond to this right away. We? Was there any need to even stay together now that the mission had come to its end? He didn’t know how to respond. Was it better for the two to stay together in order to watch the other self-destruct in this foreign time, or would they at least have a chance if they split up and tried to forget the future that each represented to the other? Or would that only guarantee a lonelier death? Perlez felt so tired. The air in the past seemed heavier. Gravity seemed stronger.

Dean spoke again. “We can split up.”

“What?” Perlez turned to face his colleague.

“Maybe--” Dean’s voice grew more hesitant and confused as he spoke, nervous under the fiery eyes of his colleague, “--maybe that would be better. We don’t actually have to stay together now. It might make it easier.”

Perlez didn’t say anything, but he nodded. Dean watched anxiously, perhaps hoping that his colleague would say no, that is madness, who else do we have in this time but each other? What purpose is there to separation but death? Surely this would be nothing less than the embracing of self-destruction. But Perlez wouldn’t speak, and Dean could not tell if his words had wounded his colleague. Perlez simply walked into his bedroom, closed the door, and did not open it for the rest of the day.

At first, Dean was anxious, and hoped for Perlez to come out and say something to him. But he had accepted the moods of this man and simply tried to go about the day as if the closed door was just part of the wall, as if the room behind it did not even exist. Mostly, he just stared at the map, contemplating possible routes. Of course, he could not stay there in Braunau, much as he liked his job and the town. If the woman were to see him on the street, who knew what she might say or do? Although it was tempting to stay close and monitor the child’s development, the design of the mission had been clear: once the child had been operated upon, the men were to disappear from his life. They had only card to play, and once played, they were to leave the game without another word.

When Dean went to sleep, the door to Perlez’s room was still closed. He had heard nothing all day long. And when he woke up the next morning, the door was open, but Perlez was gone.

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 3 of 5

Reader, you have not been abandoned. The time that has passed is meant to be an approximation of the time that has passed for Perlez and Dean, who were out on the cold road to Braunau when last we left them. A short time has passed for you, but that agony of waiting is a hint of the tribulations endured by our two time-lost scientists, who we rejoin months after we last saw them, in the last days of winter in Braunau.

Yes, the two reached their destination after months of journeying. What they suffered through was too harsh to imagine, and too cruel to describe. They were hungry; they were beggars. Some towns they stopped in for days at a time to do manual labour for the simple pleasures of food in the belly and a wall to stop the wind.

They rarely talked about the future anymore. Both men knew the requirements of their mission and had no need to remind each other of the rest. And in the simple requirements of bending one’s back to work in a mine or toil on a farm, they found a sort of respite from the horrors of disorientation that had plagued them so much at first. With a sort of brotherly pride, Perlez saw Dean stabilize his mind and find the solace of the momentary. Perhaps this was a tenuous grip on sanity, but how rare to ever grasp such a thing firmly.

The day was April 25, 1889, and the men had been in Braunau for over a week, lodging in a small inn on the outskirts of the town. They had been drawn to the place by its lack of visibility. When they had asked a man on the street for the location of the nearest inn, he pointed to the building right behind them and they realized this was the place for them. A white-haired couple ran the place, and they seemed to do it more as a hobby than an active business pursuit. Still, they had been a little wary of these two dirty drifters, with the fingers on their gloves worn clean through and the stink on their clothes making the dog choke. But Perlez and Dean were models of politeness, and after a few days of regular access to water and a clean bed, they even began to look respectable again.

The two had both managed to find work fairly quickly, much to their relief, as they needed to stay around the town until they completed their mission. Their first setback in Braunau had been one of the most crushing they had yet encountered. Armed with the name and location of an inn from the history books, they had gone to find the home of the Hitler family, only to discover that the inn was not there. Asking around town for its location proved fruitless--it did not exist, according to anyone they asked.

Both men were naturally concerned that history had changed in such a way as to obliterate the inn from time. Perhaps the family was not even living in Braunau. Still, they could not be certain. History books are wrong; facts get distorted. All they could do was watch the town for leads. And as they did that, Perlez would work for a local carpenter, while Dean worked at a large farm just outside the town limits.

The two men were a little lost at first as to how they could gain access to the Hitler family. It was not a large town, but as outsiders, they could not really go around asking about these people. Such behaviour would immediately raise suspicion and cause rumours to spread, perhaps even frightening the prey. All they could do was put themselves in a position to discreetly observe the family and perhaps somehow find a way to operate on the child.

Still, they had three years to accomplish their mission in this town before the Hitler family moved away--if the history books were still correct, which they might no longer be. In the early days of their time in Braunau, Perlez and Dean concentrated on simply creating a rhythm for their own lives, learning the town and its inhabitants, accustoming themselves to the ritual of daily labour and living in this epoch. After the months of uncertainty out on the road, there was something almost relaxing about waking up warm and knowing where you would be that day, and even better, knowing that you would fall asleep warm, in that same spot, nestled in the same tranquility you were feeling at that very moment. If the first danger had been disorientation, then this sense of stasis and security became the next threat to the mission, for the men could simply lose themselves in their lives at this point and become swallowed up in the rhythm to which they now clung.

Perlez was discovering this quite quickly as he sawed and hammered, each movement a form of seduction. He occasionally lost himself in the moment, only afterwards realizing that this was not his time and he had a mission to perform. How could he not? Try to saw a beam. You move forward and then back. Forward and back. Try to hammer a nail. The hammer moves up and down. Up and down. Every motion contains its opposition. Everything returns. When it was over, Perlez would look up, slightly lost for a moment. Wasn’t there more to his life than this hammer and nail? And then he would remember it all, but just for a second--the reporters asking him what he expected to find in the past, his wife crying as she said she was proud of him even though she would never forgive him, Dean’s troubled expression minutes before leaving when he asked if it was right that a suicidal gesture would make them immortal. Perlez remembered it all, and shivered. And Mr. Ostheim would see this and ask “Are you cold?” And Perlez would reply, “It must have just been a chill.”

It was a fine balance. When the pair was separated, each man alone found it quite easy to be drawn into the era. They did not quite forget who they originally were, but became who they pretended to be. Each man needed the other to remind him of his pretences, while at the same time, each needed space from the other in order to develop the façade that would allow both to survive and thrive in this epoch.

After work, Perlez would often stop in at one of the taverns around town. He tried to hit a different one each day, expecting (or hoping) that Adolf’s father would appear eventually. A black and white photograph of the man floated through Perlez’s memory as he scanned the crowds of labourers out to belt back a few before heading home. Sometimes they didn’t even bother doing that. They just stayed until they had to be dragged to their beds by half-drunk friends.

Perlez was obviously not one of those types. He had a few glasses of ale, read the paper, chatted lightly with a few men, but did not imbibe too much. He had to stay alert and attentive for a lead. Still, Dean would occasionally tease him, suggesting that perhaps he had developed an excessive fondness for the beer of the past, but Perlez waved off this talk, often quite angrily. This was one of the only ways available ways of gathering information about the town, save for whatever gossip they gleaned from their landlords or coworkers. What was Dean doing anyway to further the mission? Milking cows? Plowing fields? What did this have to do with anything? These conversations usually ended badly, with Perlez fuming while Dean sat in quiet dejection, unable or unwilling to defend himself.

More often, they just talked about their respective days and skirted the subject of the mission. Each presented the mundane facts of their daily routine--the progress of the building Perlez was working on, the gossip spread by the other labourers on the farm--as if one would find meaning where the other could not. The previous day, in fact, Perlez had finally acknowledged this absurdity when he said to Dean, “I don’t understand why this should mean more to me than it does to you.”

“Would it be better if I didn’t tell you anything at all?” Dean had responded, the curtness in his voice uncharacteristic. But even he had limits to his temper.

“It’s okay,” Perlez said, his voice sagging with resignation. “We have years.”

This silenced both men, and Perlez regretted it the instant he spoke. Of course they had years. They had their entire lives. Neither man had yet to overcome the drive to complete the mission quickly, as if they could go home whenever they had succeeded. There was no home. This was their home. They moved forward as fast as possible, but their every step was stretched over months. It had taken them so long to reach Braunau, and who knew how long it would take them to find the Hitlers and gain access to Adolf.

As Perlez sat in a pub called the Harrow on April 25, 1889, he contemplated the prospect of years of this. In the back of his mind, he still told himself this was the mission. And a year from now, would it still be the mission? Two years? And three? He tilted back a mug of the dark ale and swallowed. When did it cease to be the mission and simply become his life?

He sat at the bar, leaning against it and watching the inhabitants of the pub. For a place called the Harrow, the crowd seemed a strange mix of office workers and craft men. There were few farmers or agriculture workers, but plenty of clerks and cobblers and carpenters.

“Do you think the spring will be wet?” a young man next to Perlez said suddenly.

“What?” He hadn’t even been paying attention, but he turned to look at the young man, who seemed in his early twenties, at the oldest. He sat anxiously, shifting with a nervous energy.

“A wet spring,” he repeated, “Do you think we’ll have a wet spring?”

“Sure, why not?” Perlez said casually, as if the spring had been waiting for his permission.

“I think so too,” the young man agreed. “Are you a farmer?”

“Apprenticing to be a carpenter,” Perlez said. “And you?”

“My family is.” The young man downed the bottom half of his mug. Perlez felt uncomfortable about this strange, twitchy boy. Even as he was goading Perlez into inane conversation, he was barely committed to the very dialogue he was sparking.

“But what are you?” Perlez pressed on, resolved to get some solid fact out of this person, if nothing else.

“I guess I’m a farmer too,” the young man said. “I just help around a bit. I might try to get an apprenticeship in town.”

“Pick up a craft,” Perlez agreed. “It’s the way of the future.”

The young man looked at Perlez as if he had been insulted. He turned to the bartender and asked for another beer. As the young man was paying, Perlez turned his attention back to the crowd and scanned the people for the face in that black and white photograph he held in his memory, a picture of Hitler’s father.

When the young man received his beer, he took it and left the bar, heading for an empty table at the front of the pub near the window. He sat there alone, glowering at the crowd, drinking contemptuously. Perlez just tried to ignore him.

“Alois, how are you?” a voice called out suddenly, and Perlez’s body jolted so hard that he slid off his stool.

He scanned the crowd for the source of the voice (or the subject of its address) and spotted a tall middle-aged man, gaunt and clean-shaven, neatly dressed in a suit. Several people had stood to greet him, all gathering around to shake the man’s hand. He smiled thinly through it all, flustered and embarrassed by the attention. “Alois, congratulations!” a man at a table across the room called out. The tall man waved his hand in acknowledgement.

“So, how is the child?” someone asked. “And your wife, how is she?”

“Both are doing quite well,” the tall man said. “She was quite weak for the first couple of days, but she’s doing good now.”

“Oh, good, good,” the original voice said, sitting the tall man down at a table. “And the name?”

“Adolf.” The tall man smiled a bit sheepishly.

“Noble wolf,” the original voice chuckled.

“He’ll grow into it,” the tall man said, and the whole table laughed.

Perlez stared at the group so intently that they might have taken offence if they had been paying attention. But the mood was jubilant and colloquial, and the four men at the table were all too busy congratulating Alois to pay any heed to the lone man at the bar whose eyes were those of a starving man seeing food for the first time in a week. You might expect Perlez to leap to his feet and rejoice at this moment, but consider: there is a hesitation that comes from not knowing whether that roast dripping in gravy is salvation from the pain of hunger, or merely the first hallucination of a mind undone, the first sign of the end.

It is a sad state of affairs when a man cannot embrace the very reason he has for living when it at last appears to him, but there was at least grounds to pause in this case. Alois bore so little resemblance to the photograph in Perlez’s mind. Granted, he could have gained weight and grown facial hair later in life, but his height, his features--it all seemed wrong. But what was actually wrong here? The man? Or Perlez’s mind?

A great crash drew Perlez’s attention, and he saw that the young man had just knocked down one of the other patrons. The man on the ground seemed more amused than wounded, lying on his back and laughing at the spluttering rage of the young man. Two of the downed man’s friends held back the young man and the pub owner just sneered and said “Get him out of here.”

The two men threw him into the street and when he tried to stand, one gave him a mighty kick in the ribs that sent him back to the ground. He lay there, face in the dirt, and by the shaking of his body, Perlez guessed that he was crying. When his body stopped shaking, he stood up, face red, and walked away. The men inside at the table where the altercation had occurred laughed.

“Farm kids,” the pub owner sighed. “They can’t hold their liquor.”

When he turned his attention back to the table where Alois was sitting, Perlez saw the man getting up to leave. “Oh, stay a little longer,” one of the other men said.

“I wish I could,” Alois said, “but I do need to get back home. I just wanted to stop in for a quick one.”

“Well, we’ll be here,” the original voice said.

“Oh, I know it,” Alois responded with a smile, and they all laughed again.

Perlez threw down some money on the counter and walked out after the man. The streets were not crowded, so he tried to avoid following too closely. But a block away from the Harrow, Perlez encountered the young man again, still red-faced and livid.

“You’ve got to help me,” the young man said.

“What?” Perlez didn’t even look the young man in the face. His eyes were on Alois walking up the street.

“I just need someone to back me up, I can take him if he doesn’t set his friends on me again.”

“Kid, you’re drunk,” Perlez said, walking away.

The young man grabbed his shirt. “Fuck you,” he spit.

“Get off me.” Perlez shoved him away and he lost balance and fell down. Alois looked backed nervously and turned down a street. Perlez rushed after him, not glancing back at the young man, who tossed out several more curses.

Perlez caught sight of Alois making another turn just as he reached the corner and so he ran down the empty side street. When he reached where Alois had turned, he stopped to catch his breath and watched the man enter a blue building with a sign that said Gruber Inn. Perlez walked up to the building and saw stared at the windows from across the street. On the top floor, though the rooms seemed dark, he could make out the figure of Alois.

This had to be the place. True, the man did not quite match the photograph, but no matter--how much accuracy could they assume out of the past anyway? Some spiteful archivist, looking at a picture of the pompous father of a hated cousin and thinking to himself, “You, uncle, shall forever be known as Hitler’s father.” That was all it took to change everything.

Perlez made a mental note of the address and began to walk home. There was no need to shadow the place tonight; Alois had already seen him and might grow suspicious if he spotted Perlez lurking around.

As he walked home, a man running down the street stopped him and in a breathless voice asked, “Are you a doctor?”

“No. I’m not.”

The man made an exasperated noise and continued running down the street.

Perlez turned up the collar on his coat. The cooler night air was descending upon the town, taking the place of the light that had been there during the day. It was not dark, but the sun was low and the light was growing dimmer.

Around the Harrow, Perlez saw a crowd of people. That stupid kid, he thought to himself. Is he fighting again?

He paused behind the crowd and tried to look over the heads, but he couldn’t. All he could see was that the window had shattered.

“What happened?” he asked an older gentleman at the back of the group of onlookers.

“A fight broke out,” the older man said. “As you would expect of a place like this.”

Perlez strained on his toes to see over the crowd, which was growing thicker by the second.

“People don’t realize that these public houses breed a certain type of a man,” the older man continued. “I would never drink a drop. Brings out the worst in a man, you know?”

“Yeah,” Perlez said, moving away from older man. Between the heads of the people in the crowd, like a hole hidden in a hedge, Perlez could make out the body of the young man in the broken front window. His face and body were cut everywhere from broken glass, his torso impaled on a shard.

“He reaped what he sowed,” the older man said contemptuously.

* * *

When Perlez got back to the inn, the first thing Dean asked him was, “Are you hungry?”

“No.” Perlez sat down at the table and slumped down in his chair. He stared for a moment at nothing.

“Are you drunk?” Dean asked.

“No.” After a pause, he added, “I found Hitler.”

Dean’s face brightened. “You did? That’s fantastic! How did you do it? Where are they? Did you see the child?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“But I thought you said--”

“No, I know where they live. But that’s all.”

In the weary tone of Perlez’s voice, Dean sensed something amiss. “Are you sure it’s them?”

“I followed the father home. He didn’t looked like the picture, but his name was Alois and his son was named Adolf.”

Dean smiled. “Well, that sounds pretty close to me.”

“You’re right,” Perlez sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”

Dean sat down at the table across from his colleague. “That’s okay.”

For a moment, neither said a word, and Perlez was aware of Dean’s eyes on him, examining him. Whenever Perlez grew quiet or withdrawn, or so angry and frustrated he could not speak, Dean would just stare at him, as if he would somehow draw all of the information he needed just through close consideration of the man. As if his face betrayed him, his gestures sold him out, the sweat on his brow said things he couldn’t silence. In his passive way, Dean was demanding information, and Perlez would not give it. This thing that he had seen, that he had been--yes, it was true--involved in, belonged only to him. He would not burden Dean with it.

“I’m stepping out,” he declared, standing up suddenly.

Dean shifted nervously in his chair. “But you just came in.”

“It’s okay,” he replied. “I just need to think a bit about a plan. That’s all.”

Perlez grabbed his coat and walked out, leaving Dean sitting at the table in the dimming room. And after a while, unable to sit any longer, Dean stood, and walked around the room.

The apartment they were renting was spare, and Dean had come to know it well in the short time the two men had occupied it. Little wonder, since as Perlez sulked in pubs and wandered the streets restlessly, Dean paced, Dean sat, Dean waited.

There was the sitting room, where he now stood, with its table and four chairs, plus two upholstered chairs flanked by two small stands. And then there were the two bedrooms, each with a single bed, a nightstand, and an armoire. The floors were wooden and worn down in places. Each room had a single faded green rug.

If this sounds oppressively barren, save your pity for someone else. Dean appreciated the austerity. In the future, he had lived in clutter. His home had been a mess of accumulation. He bought things, bought things to store the things he had bought, bought things to expand the storage capacity of the things he had bought to store the things he had bought before, and so on--an endless march of consumption in which he became an accessory to the things he owned. Maybe all of the clutter was a way of holding on to his money, and the time spent earning it, rather than throwing it away. Each object in his home had been earned by a certain expenditure of his life, and each object contained some trace of that discarded essence, retained in a flimsy gesture towards immortality.

Perhaps this had been the greatest shock of the past for Dean. The people here spent money with a casual disregard for its worth. They were only beginning to discover the immense gravity of things, the sheer burden of possession--possession, that ambiguous word which referred to owning and being owned. Instead, these strange people, these savages--as the more blunt historians of Dean’s day might say--spent their days working and their nights wasting their money on food and drink and little more. Did they save? Did they even believe in the future? When Dean looked out and saw his coworkers heading out to drink their day’s wages, he wondered, do they think they will be dead tomorrow? And so he paced the room, learning to appreciate its emptiness.

Emptiness is not an obvious virtue to appreciate, of course. He walked the room, emptied of life, of things, of time. If there was nothing on the nightstand, it did not bother him. He did not think it needed something. When he looked at that empty space, he took pleasure in the fact that nothing was there. And he was a little disappointed at the thought that something would probably fill this space eventually. First, a new building in a few decades. A wall, a desk, a water pipe. Then, the building gone: a street light, a road, cars, trucks, birds. Another building: a bed, a body, two bodies, no bodies, dust, air. On and on, until ten thousand years later, and only ice, a glacier as wide as a city. And beyond that (how many tens of thousands of years would it take?): fire. And then, at last, nothing. Time might seem to be calling the shots now, but Dean knew: the real winner would always be emptiness.

This was how Dean spent his evenings. On a certain level, he understood he was failing the mission. Obviously, there had to be time for adjustment to the past, but that should have past by now. He had ceased to experience the disorienting episodes in which his identity faded and his memories blurred with hallucinations; he could even read the newspapers once in a while and not feel himself to be an escaped mental patient.

But how to fit into the era? At the farm, the other labourers laughed and talked about loves, fights, families. He smiled quietly through it all, withdrawn but friendly. The others accepted it, although it was not hard to detect a little resentment, as if his reticence was also a judgment (which, he was loathe to admit, it probably was).

But perhaps it did not matter now that Perlez had found the family. They could carry out the mission and then have a lifetime to adjust to this commitment, this horrible commitment to a time that had no use for them and would never know what they had done for (or to) it.

There was one thing that worried Dean about completing the mission. While Perlez pushed forward with his characteristic obstinacy, Dean felt himself dragged along, almost fearing completion of the mission. For this mission was their everything--it was the goal they worked for, the principle that organized their damaged lives--and once they completed it, what then? If Dean was living for the completion of the mission, why on earth should he ever complete it? The moment of success would be his death.

These thoughts were madness, he knew it. They signalled a betrayal of the values for which he had thrown away his future. And Perlez’s sacrifice? Would he betray that as well?

There was simply too much defy. He could harbour these agonies, but never set them loose. All he could do was fulfill his obligation--to the future, to Perlez--and then, when it was all done, he would find a house somewhere, a quiet house with large empty rooms and a view of nothing in particular, just some trees and grass, that would be enough.

Realizing the darkness of the room, Dean lit a candle and sat back at the table. He rested his head on his arm, and stared at the wallpaper on the opposite side of the room. The candle cast a thin cover of light over it, like a veil upon the darkness, and Dean watched how the flickering of the candle made this veil seem to flutter as if caught in a breeze.

When the door opened, Dean lifted his head from his sleepy reverie. Perlez entered, coat torn, pants dirty, face bruised, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. He stood in the doorway, looking down at Dean, who said nothing but just stared up at his colleague with uncomprehending eyes.

“Have you not moved from that spot since I left?” Perlez asked. Without waiting for an answer, he walked into his room and Dean watched him splashing his face with water from his washbasin. And then he spat into the water, and shut the door.

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 2 of 5

Reader, you may not understand what has gone before. That is no sin, but a fact of life. You cannot be blamed for it.

What you need to know is this: Benedict Dean and David Perlez are waking up in their room in Kufstein, Austria, circa 1888. They are not of this time, but it is the only time they have now. You might be disoriented in this story; fear not, your disorientation is a mirror of their own.

Perlez woke first, and when his eyes opened, he shuddered. In his head, he had been centuries away, at some distant point in the future, walking down a street in a city not yet named, speaking words that referred to things not yet invented. Then a blast of light from the window shattered it and he realized it was an illusion. He existed in a sidebar in a history textbook now; the future was a fantasy for the profit of writers. If he tried to speak about his past to anyone but Dean, he would be labelled a lunatic. He glanced over at his comrade, who stretched, eyes still shut, seemingly contented.

Dean opened his eyes slowly. He lay on his back, just staring at the ceiling, water-stained and cracked in places. Turning his head to Perlez, he said good morning. And then shut his eyes again.

Perlez sat up and said, “Get out of bed.”

His colleague did not move. Without saying anything else, Perlez dressed himself and packed up the few things he had taken out the night before. When that was done, he sat done at one of the chairs at the table and watched Dean.

“It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be,” Dean said. “Last night, I mean.”

Perlez still did not speak. He rested his head against his fist and stared straight as his colleague, no expression on his face.

"I didn't even dream of the past,” Dean explained. He chuckled, adding, “By which I mean the future. Did you?”

There was no response.

Dean continued. “I thought I would, but I didn't. I dreamt as if I was born in 1855, someone else's life as if it was my own.

“I saw myself farming, isn't that ridiculous? I don't even know the first thing about farming. But I imagined myself helping my father--though it wasn't my father--put shoes on the horses. I thought it seemed a painful thing to do, but he told me it had to be done, and I believed him. And then the horse kicked him and I was terrified. I got so angry at the animal that I even hit it. I've never done that in my life. I would never beat a horse, no animal. But I lashed it so hard that I think I drew blood.

“The only thing that stopped me was my mother--though it wasn't my mother--and I realized that as I had been beating this animal my father had been writhing in pain on the floor. And I wiped the blood off the animal and let it calm before I rode it to the nearest doctor.

“When we got back, my father was dead. The bleeding had been too much. So I killed the horse, because there seemed no justice in letting it live. My mother didn't seem too happy about that.

“I didn't dream about my wife or my parents or my friends. It's like I forgot all of that the instant I shut my eyes,” and here Dean's voice faltered, just slightly, “but I--”

Perlez leaned back in his chair, eyes never wavering from Dean's face. “Get up,” he said. “We're going.”

Dean sat up in bed and rubbed his face, rubbing so hard with the tips of his fingers it almost looked like he was clawing away at a mask. “But I slept well,” he added. “I really did.”

“Good.”

After Dean had dressed and gathered together his things, the two left the room, left the hotel, left the city.

The wind from the north bit down hard, but the two men were glad to be free from the city. The oppressive air of the city, with all of its noises and smells, dissipated within minutes of escaping Kufstein's boundaries. Out in the countryside, the two men were freed from the schizophrenia forced upon them by the city, which required them to somehow live in their own time and the present. Hundreds of years from now, a tree will still look like a tree. It may have been an illusion, but at least for a little while, the men could forget when they were.

The plan was to head straight north, working or begging whenever necessary. It could take several months to slowly wind their way up to Braunau, but by the time they reached their destination, Perlez and Dean would hopefully have finally eased themselves into 1888. This was their decompression chamber.

The first few days passed uneventfully. Usually, they tried to watch for farms where they could sleep overnight in the barns. They would circle the periphery until the lights in the house went out, and then crawl into a pile of straw, leaving before sunrise. With what little money they had left, they managed to purchase the occasional loaf of bread, otherwise relying upon nature to provide enough fruit and vegetables for sustenance.

In their own time, they would have considered their actions thievery. But out here, in this strange time and place, such categories seemed less defined. Who were these people that they stole from? To Perlez and Dean, the light in the farm house was pure abstraction. There was a person controlling that light, of course, but they never saw who it was, some person who was not even a footnote in history. They were nowhere to be found, not in the margins, not even in the background of some grainy, black and white photograph. What did it matter if they were a few apples less? They were nobody.

It was not a matter of morality. Who really owns an apple anyway? Do you own the seed? Do you own the tree? And then do you own the shit afterwards? The compost? The dead rot? The nutrients feeding someone else's tree in the soil? Do worms steal from you? To consider it a crime to take a few pieces of fruit from a tree or even from a barrel is nonsense. But the danger in all of this was that Perlez and Dean had not yet found a way to make these people real. They had their own ingrained sense of respect for the property of others, but out on the road, they did not recognize any others. Out on the road, they were the only ones who existed in this world.

Their first real encounter on the road came after a week of walking. It was around midday, and the two men were silent, each quietly retreated into his own memories, sifting through what to keep and throw away, the things they would hold onto the longest before they succumbed to the amnesia of the present.

From behind, a clattering of hooves could be heard--distant, and then growing closer. Perlez glanced back and tugged on Dean's sleeve to pull his comrade to the side of the road as the carriage passed.

It was a large wooden carriage pulled by four horses. The body was windowless and unadorned save for the words "Miracles of Science" painted in a mannered script on the side. The driver sitting up top and holding the reins appeared to be a midget. Perlez and Dean exchanged a glance as it passed them, spitting up dust.

“Do you think--” Dean asked.

“We can only assume,” Perlez cut him off, and the two said no more for several hours.

They trudged along, both weary and malnourished, until the sun began to set and they were faced with the unpleasant prospect of another night without shelter. There appeared to be no farms in sight, no nearby town to offer them cover. So they kept walking, hoping to find something or else simply fall to sleep out of sheer exhaustion.

Before long, they noticed that the trail of the carriage, which had proceeded their every step like a taunt, veered off the road. The grass beside the road was crushed, clods of dirt torn up by hooves. Behind a line of trees, the two men could make out the flickering light of a fire.

“Should we?” Dean whispered.

Perlez gave him an irritated look. “Do you really think there's any point in begging from him? Do you really think we'll get anything?”

“You can ask and find out,” the man called from behind the trees.

Dean shrugged and walked forward, Perlez reluctantly following behind.

As Perlez and Dean drew closer to the fire, the man who had called them looked startled. He pointed at Perlez. “Aren't you the man from Kufstein?”

Perlez nodded.

“Well, no matter,” the man said, gesturing to a cast iron pot heating over the fire. “Everyone has to eat, I suppose.”

He stood and handed each a bowl, ladled out some stew to each man, and then handed each a piece of slightly stale bread. “It's not much, but it'll do.”

Dean started eating immediately, but Perlez looked down at his food and then back at the man. “You seem very trusting for a shyster.”

The man laughed. “And you're too sincere to be a murderer.” He paused and grew grave for a moment. “Or do you think I poison beggars for sport?”

Perlez did not laugh, but ate slowly.

“Not entirely sport, I suppose,” the man continued facetiously. “I chop up the last batch for the stew, and then feed it to the next bunch. It's a wonderfully efficient system.”

“I understand, I understand,” Perlez muttered, mouth half-full. “Thank you, we both appreciate this, especially considering--”

“Yes, no matter, it made for a good show,” the man said dismissively, waving his hand.

After Perlez and Dean had finished eating, the man collected the bowls and said, “So, we should probably be properly introduced. I am Bernhard Cuyler, and you two gentlemen--”

“David Perlez.”

“Oh, is that Spanish?” Cuyler said, shaking his hand.

“Sure,” Perlez said.

“Benedict Dean.”

“You must be the ascetic of the two,” Cuyler smiled, shaking hands.

“What?” Dean asked.

“Never mind,” Cuyler said, sitting back down on his side of the fire. “So, where are you gentlemen headed, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Braunau,” Perlez said.

“Oh, what is there?”

“Work.”

Cuyler smiled at Perlez's terseness, seeming to take pleasure in the man's obvious discomfort with questioning and yet never flagging in his polite, innocuous tone. “But there is work everywhere. What is so special about Braunau?”

“Honest work,” Perlez said, almost growling.

This provoked a bit laugh out of Cuyler. “Oh, is that an insult? Biting the hand that feeds you so soon? Well, this is honest work, I'll have you know. Pure theatre for the amusement and education of the public. What could be more honest? If I were a paid soldier, taking money for lives, would that be more honest? I take money for lies, and it's as good and clean a living as any you'll find out there in Braunau.”

Perlez and Dean exchanged an anxious glance at this good-natured tirade from their host, and Cuyler continued. “So let us drop our pretensions, shall we? If I'm a fraud, then I know other frauds when I meet them. None of us have any need for honest men, do we? If there is one person I cannot trust, it is the honest man, who is too ignorant to even know his own lies when he speaks them. You are not honest men, obviously, so tell me: why are you going to Braunau?”

“We are from the future,” Dean said, “and we wish to prevent a child born in Braunau from becoming a tyrant.”

“Was that so hard?” Cuyler said, smiling. Perlez and Dean did not look at each other. Both men just stared into the fire, unburdened and yet feeling no better.

“What, do you believe us?” Dean asked.

Cuyler's expression turned bemused. “What sort of idiot do you take me for?”

Neither Perlez nor Dean cared to correct Cuyler.

The man poured the remains of the stew into his own bowl and set the pot on the dirt beside the fire. As he ate, he talked. “Listen, if you want work, I can use some help. You--” he indicated Perlez “--can keep on doing that deranged skeptic thing of yours, which plays quite well. As for you--” and here he indicated Dean “--I'm sure I can find something for you to do.”

“I don't know,” Perlez said.

“You see, that's why I'm hiring you,” Cuyler said, slurping the last drops of broth from his bowl. “Anyway, think about it. Tell me tomorrow morning.”

With that said, Cuyler stood up and walked to the carriage, opening the back door. A small hand from inside passed several blankets to Cuyler and he shut the door. “My companion is shy,” he explained, passing a blanket each to Perlez and Dean. He wrapped himself in his own blanket and leaned back against the wheel of his carriage. One of the horses tied to a tree snorted and grabbed a mouthful of grass.

“Good night, gentlemen,” Cuyler said, and shut his eyes.

“Come on,” Perlez said to Dean. He stood up and walked away from the fire, leaving the blanket behind. Dean followed.

The two walked a little ways into the woods, where they could still see the fire but felt out of the range of Cuyler's hearing.

“He's insane,” Perlez said.

Dean shrugged. “Well, he seems to think the same of us. Kindred spirits, perhaps?”

Perlez scowled. “No, I don't think so.”

“But we can actually get somewhere with him. We might start to make some progress if we travel with him.”

“But he seems so dishonest. How can we trust him?”

“We can't, of course, but who can we trust? Trying to get by on our own will get us nowhere, I fear.”

Perlez nodded and his expression darkened as he resigned himself to this opportunity that had been presented to them. “I had just hoped we could get by for a while on our own, until we were ready to start dealing with this era.”

“So had I,” Dean agreed. “But we can't hide out here forever.”

The two said nothing more; they returned to the fire, wrapped themselves in the blankets, and tried to let themselves fall asleep. It was difficult, but they managed after a while. And if Cuyler had been listening to them, he gave no indication of it.

The next morning, they awoke to the sound of Cuyler stirring the ashes. “Good morning,” he called cheerfully as he noticed Dean's eyes open. “I trust you slept well.”

“As well as one can out here,” Dean said, stiffly pulling himself to his feet and brushing the dirt and dead grass from his pants. My god, he thought, looking down at himself, I look like a derelict. No wonder he thinks we're insane. We look like we could have escaped from a mental hospital.
Dean paused at this thought. Maybe we did.

Perlez opened his eyes at the sound of their voices and groaned a little as he stood. “We'll come with you,” he said to Cuyler.

“And good morning to you too,” Cuyler replied.

They set off shortly afterwards, with Perlez and Dean riding on top of the carriage alongside Cuyler, who held the reins.

“My friend does not take kindly to strangers,” Cuyler explained again, almost as if apologizing for making the pair ride up top with him.

“Most people don't,” Perlez replied.

“True, true,” Cuyler said, snapping the reins.

“So where are we headed?” Dean asked.

“Northerly.”

Dean said nothing to this, and the three men fell into silence as Cuyler focused on the road while the other two watched the countryside shift and change rapidly, moving from field to forest to field again with a joyous speed. Everything changed so quickly, but none of it really seemed to change at all. There were no cities or towns out here breaking up the continuity of the landscape, just a single line of thought uninterrupted.

Watching the landscape ebb and flow between development and wilderness, Dean lapsed into a meditative state, contemplating his earlier notion that they couldhave escaped from a mental hospital. There was something seductive about the notion that he was insane. Imagine all of this as a delusion, and these trees are not trees (they are walls) and this road is not a road (it is a floor) and this carriage is not a carriage (it is a bed) and this fear is not fear (it is stupefaction) and this exhaustion is not exhaustion (it is dementia). And the mission?

Perhaps there was some peace in this thought: that there was no purpose to what he was doing because none of this was real. Dean saw himself walking through a hallway, the floor all dingy brown and the walls painted grey. When he entered his room, there was a cast iron bed with a thin mattress and a scratchy grey blanket. There were bars on the one window in theroom, but it was too high up to see out of anyway.

He laid himself down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and said, “I saw myself farming, isn't that ridiculous?” But when he looked around, Perlez was not there. He was alone, and he fell silent.

Perlez came in and told him to run away quickly, but he didn't understand what was happening and he tried to tell his friend about his dream. Two men came in and grabbed him, and Perlez screamed--he actually screamed, Dean had never heard his friend scream before--and the men asked Dean where he was from. When he said the future, one man slapped him and so Dean started crying and he heard one of the men say lobotomy but Perlez was still screaming and so he didn't hear everything that was being said. And he looked out the window and it was sunny, but the window was so high he couldn't see the sun so maybe it actually wasn't sunny after all.

The men carried him without any difficulty; he did not resist. This must be my life, he thought, it comes so naturally to me. The men slapped him down on the table like a wet rag and strapped down his arms and legs. Another man came up and said I'm a doctor, now where are you from. Dean said the future even though he might get slapped again, but no one did anything this time. The man held out a knife and Dean wanted to lift his arm to touch it, and one of the men said, won't this be painful, and the other said, yes, but it doesn't matter because he won't remember it. Shut your eyes, the doctor said, and he did, and he tried to imagine where he came from, figured it would be there when his eyes opened, but when his eyes opened, he was on a carriage with Perlez and a man who looked like the doctor.

“This isn't the future,” he said, and then he doubled over in pain and vomited over the side of the carriage.

“I'm not stopping,” Cuyler declared.

“I think there's something wrong with him,” Perlez said, reaching out to hold onto Dean in order to prevent the man from falling off the carriage.

Cuyler shook his head. “He'll be better soon enough--probably just motion sickness.”

Perlez said nothing, but held on to Dean's shirt as he leaned over the side and heaved. Cuyler pulled out a small flask and handed it to Perlez. “There's some ginger in this. It might help a little.”

When Dean was sitting upright again, he wiped his mouth and took a sip from the flask. “Are you a doctor?” he asked Cuyler.

“In name only,” Cuyler replied, taking the flask back and putting it in his coat.

Perlez didn't say anything, but the look he gave Dean was enough. “I'm okay,” Dean said. “Just motion sickness, I suppose.”

“There, you see--nothing to worry about,” Cuyler said. “And anyways, we'll be stopping soon.”

Dean looked up and saw the outline of a town looming at the end of the road, pulling them in like a black hole.

The eyes of the townspeople were on the carriage as it slowly made its way through the streets towards the town square. Who were these strangers, with this ridiculous declaration, Miracles of Science? What nonsense would they try to sell? Were they thieves or murderers? People watched with caution, a few following the carriage to see where it would stop.

The driver pulled to a stop in the town square, right beside a church, and then stood on top of the carriage in order to address the people who had followed.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “my name is Bernhard Cuyler, and for those of you who have not heard of me, I travel from town to town bringing all the wonders of scientific progress and enlightenment to the public.

“Tomorrow, I--with my associates Mr. Benedict Dean, a rogue monk, and Mr. David Perlez, from Spain--shall present to you a series of unexplainable phenomena that will dazzle and astound you. I promise it shall be a day of infamy in the history of your fair town.”

With that said, he sat down and picked up the reins again. Calling out to the crowd, he added, “And now can someone point me to a reputable inn?”

Several people pointed east, a couple pointed west, and someone pointed in the direction which the cart had come from. Cuyler chose west.

“Rogue monk?” Dean asked, mildly amused.

“We'll figure out the details later,” Cuyler smiled. “You have to earn your keep somehow.”

Continuing in his generous vein, Cuyler offered to pay for a room for Perlez and Dean, although he explained that this meant he would not split the proceeds from the next day's show with them. Not being in a position to protest, they accepted this condition, grateful for the shelter and warmth, even if only for one night.

In the room, Perlez could finally ask Dean, “What happened back there?”

Dean sat down on his bed. “I don't know. I imagined I was in an asylum, and I was a madman saying I was from the future, and then I opened my eyes and I was on that carriage, and...I don't know.”

“Are you losing your mind?” Perlez asked bluntly.

Dean wrapped himself in a blanket and shivered in his bed. “That was always a possibility, wasn't it?”

Perlez paced the room angrily. His movements were sudden and constrained, held in by the compactness of the room. Everything was falling apart already, and they had decades to go. How could they adjust to this era when they were penniless and fighting off dementia? It wouldn't be long before they actually did find themselves in an asylum.

“What will we do about tomorrow?” Dean finally asked.

Perlez slowed his pacing and sat on his own bed. “I don't know. Do we have a choice?”

“No,” Dean sighed. “I guess not.”

“Just go to sleep,” Perlez said. “Forget about this for a little while, at least.”

He sat there on the bed, watching Dean quietly and quickly succumb to sleep. The man was helpless in a certain sense. For all of Dean's intelligence and experience, he seemed to fade away in this era. Whatever had grounded his personality in the future was lacking now, and the man was floating apart, becoming a few fragments of a person instead of an unified whole. But what does it say about me, Perlez thought, that I can hold myself together in this time? Why do I fit in while he doesn't?

When sleep came to Perlez, he didn't even notice it. He was still sitting there on the bed, watching, vigilant right up until the moment his eyes shut.

The next morning, Cuyler woke up the two men and brought them down to the stable where the carriage was housed.

“We need to discuss what role you both will play in the show later,” he said.

“I'm really not sure what good we can be,” Perlez began, almost embarrassed. He was uncomfortable about being put in such an exposed position, and even more anxious about how Dean would handle it.

“No, I said I could use you both, and I intend to,” Cuyler said sharply, but still in his genial tone. There was such an innate sense of theatricality to his voice that it was difficult to read real emotion into what he said. Everything sounded friendly and inviting, but always with a faint aura of falseness.

“Since I've already billed you as the Spaniard, I think I'll just say that you brought the curios from Spain. Exoticism plays well out here, don't you think? By the way, do you speak Spanish?”

“No,” Perlez said. He was trying not to scowl, even though Cuyler probably would not have noticed or cared.

“Then just don't speak when you're up there. You'll be mostly a prop this time around, I suppose, until I figure out something better. But you can help me set things up and assist me as necessary. Just follow my lead.”

Cuyler turned to Dean. “And you--I've had some ideas about you. Since you're the mad monk, how do you feel about speaking in tongues? Can you speak in tongues? Give it a shot, okay?”

Dean's expression was genuinely perplexed. “Tongues?

Cuyler nodded, as if Dean had just offered a reasoned counterpoint. “You're right, that might not work for you. You seem a little too inhibited to just burst into tongues.”

There was a pause as Cuyler stared thoughtfully at Dean, considering what role fit his appearance. “How about visions of the future? A mad monk prophet of doom? What were you saying about the future the other day?”

Dean looked anxiously over at Perlez.

“Well, just come up with something,” Cuyler said. “You made it sound quite plausible the other day. Just do it again.”

Cuyler turned to leave, but added, “Meet me back here in an hour. We'll move the carriage out into the square and set up then.”

Perlez and Dean wandered through the stable without saying anything for a while. Several stalls held horses, but they were the only people around. Dean watched a horse scratch its neck against a post. Perlez watched Dean.

“Are you okay?” Perlez finally asked.

“Yes,” Dean replied, but he did not look at his colleague when he spoke.

“What are you going to say?”

Dean paused before he replied, as if he hadn't even considered it himself. “I suppose I'll tell them about the future.”

“You can't do that.”

“It's not like I'll tell them specifics, name names. But if I say that a tyrant will be born next year, what does it matter? Any fool can predict that,” Dean said, and then his voice took a sardonic turn. “Isn't that what we want? To be like any fool in this time?”

“At least you can talk,” Perlez said, and despite himself, Dean chuckled.

When they met up with Cuyler again, he was dressed in the same suit he had been wearing when they first encountered him. He held some more clothes in his arms.

“This will be for you,” he told Dean, handing him a brown robe. “It seems monk-like, I suppose.”

“And this is for you.” He handed Perlez a black towel and blue robe.

Perlez held the towel up. “What is this for?”

“It's a turban,” Cuyler explained, adding, “You wear it on your head.”

“I know that.” Irritated, Perlez pulled the robe over himself and began wrapping the towel around his head. “I wasn't aware that this was how the Spanish dressed.”

“Oh, probably not,” agreed Cuyler. “But tell me, how do Spaniards dress?”

“I would imagine they wear normal clothes like you and I.”

“Right,” Cuyler said. “So put on your turban.”

After hooking the carriage up to the horses, they headed out into the square, with Cuyler riding on top and Perlez and Dean following behind in their robes, like two penitents. Some people in the town noticed this miniature procession and began to follow the carriage, and it was with a certain anxiety that the two men noted there were others waiting in the square. Again, Cuyler parked the carriage beside the church and stood on top.

“Ladies and gentlemen, tell your friends and family that a demonstration of the miraculous heights of modern science is about to commence shortly,” he declared in his most booming voice, adding in a quieter, more conspiratorial tone, “And their wallets, of course, are invited as well.”

A few people in the audience chuckled at this, but most just watched with dull-faced curiosity, seemingly bored by the idea of whatever spectacle they were imagining. But people still came, and a crowd accumulated quite quickly, there being little else to compete with whatever paltry amusement this well-dressed stranger could provide.

But there was always a level of resentment, even in the curiosity of the crowds, and it was this resentment that always mystified Cuyler. He could just begin to fathom it, but he had yet to understand how to master it. In his mind, it was simply a result of the crowd's own resentment at itself for being fooled by such an obvious fraud. His only solution was to wink at the audience knowingly every so often as an acknowledgement of their unspoken pact: that he would fool them and they would submit to being fooled.

However, this really only covered part of the problem, and when the crowd escaped his grasp, Cuyler was helpless before it. They did resent themselves, but it was not merely a matter of resenting their submission to an obvious lie--it was a resentment at that need to submit, a need that came from the hideous boredom they were slowly discovering as their world dragged itself into modernity. This was supposed to be a new age of technology and reason, and here they were, allowing a suited buffoon to spit their irrationality back in their faces, and they would pay him for it, and talk about it excitedly the next day because there was nothing else to do between working and waiting for the next buffoon to spit in their faces. No, Cuyler did not understand the crowd at all.

But the crowd did not necessarily understand Cuyler. What seemed to observers an obvious travelling charlatan, just another freak show curator making a cheap living, was actually a man of some principle. When he said he hated “honest men,” he did not lie: he truthfully hated people who spouted pieties of honour and principle without understanding that they were putting the lie to their own lives. It was a vain hope, but nonetheless, he still wished people to leave his show thinking that perhaps the men of honour were not to be trusted, while the charlatans like himself could offer a glimpse into the strange workings of the world. Which is why he would begin his show by saying:

“What miracles have you seen in this church?” At this point, he pointed at the spire of the church. “None, I'll wager. What marvels can God bring you that man cannot himself create?”

Perlez eyed the crowd nervously, half-expecting a lynch mob to form, but they seemed more bemused than offended by Cuyler's blustery attempts at blasphemy. The townspeople might take a certain pride in their religion, not unlike the pleasure one takes in wearing fine jewellery, but they were not so consumed by their vanity that they could not laugh about it once in a while.

“Let me bring you the finest miracles from around the world,” Cuyler entreated the crowd. “My associate, Mr. Perlez, has fled from the small-minded authorities of Spain to bring us curios unknown in our lands.”

At this cue, Perlez lifted the side of the carriage, revealing a series of jars covered beneath blue cloth. People pushed forward to see what would be revealed, and Cuyler climbed down off the carriage to better direct the crowd.

Addressing Perlez, Cuyler spoke rapidly in what seemed to be utter nonsense, although there seemed to be a few stray words of French and possibly Latin. When Perlez shook his head in confusion, Cuyler leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “That's Spanish, idiot.”

Perlez sighed, feeling more foolish by the second. Refusing to engage Cuyler in a nonsense conversation, he whispered a noise that sounded vaguely like language to Cuyler, who then translated for the crowd.

“My associate says that this particular specimen--” and here he pulled away a cloth to reveal a jar containing a two-headed pig foetus “--was created out of a failed scientific experiment. Yes, science is imperfect, friends, as flawed as your shoes or the weather. Anyway, this creature was bred to fatten itself quicker, two heads being better than one--at least as far as eating is concerned.”

The audience seemed to respond well to this and actually clapped respectfully for Cuyler's spiel.

“And what do we have next?” Cuyler beckoned Perlez closer, who dutifully went through the motions of whispering again.

“Even stranger,” Cuyler intoned ominously. “This next creature was a tragic misfit that could not survive in the harsh elements. But we may behold it and wonder what might have been.”

Cuyler pulled away the next cloth to reveal a calf head totally devoid of hair. The skin was pink and veiny, while the animal's eyes were sewn shut and its bloated tongue sticking out of the mouth. Disgusted, Perlez looked away.

“No, we cannot always trust progress, I fear,” Cuyler said sadly, watching the floating head. “Some things do not turn out how we wish. Tell me, Mr. Perlez, what is next for us?”

Perlez whispered in Cuyler's ear, and as he spoke, the man's eyes grew wide. “Oh, my, really?” he asked Perlez in a horrified tone. “Do you think they are ready to see such a thing?”

Looking at the crowd, Perlez could see that not only were they ready, they were growing impatient with this ridiculous build-up just to see a few freak animal foetuses. He solemnly nodded to Cuyler.

“The next thing we shall see,” Cuyler declared in a dark tone, “is the reason our friend here is no longer in Spain. But I assure you, kind folks, that you need not fear his twisted experiments. He has renounced them as evil, and he will only use his knowledge for good. Is that not right, sir?”

Perlez nodded again.

“Good. Then I shall present to you the last of his failed experiments.” With a flourish, Cuyler swept the cloth away from the last jar. Several gasps came from the crowd as they saw a human foetus floating in the jar. The child looked no bigger than an average newborn, except that it had four arms and four legs. Perlez tried to hide his discomfort and looked at his feet. To the audience, this probably appeared like shame, and it served the purposes of the show well.

“We've all wished this, haven't we?” Cuyler asked, his voice suddenly dropping into a gentle and soothing timbre. “I've only got two arms, we say, I can't do everything at once--but what if we did have more than two arms? What an incredible achievement it would have been. The small-minded authorities in Spain saw no benefit in these experiments--are they not aware that you need to fail if you are ever to succeed?”

A woman in the audience started crying.

“Oh, do not be afraid. I assure you the child felt no pain,” Cuyler said. “We are all enlightened people here, are we not? In more superstitious times, they would have said this child was a sign of the devil. But we know better, don't we?”

The smile on Cuyler's face did nothing to lighten the mood, and Perlez could feel the crowd turning. What troubled him was that Cuyler either did not notice or did not care about the increasing unease of the spectators.

“But let us not dwell on the failures of the past,” Cuyler declared charitably. He motioned to Perlez to close the side of the carriage, which he did to the great relief of the crowd. “Now, let us turn to the future.”

Dean wandered out from behind the carriage, his eyes darting uncertainly over the crowd. Perlez stood off to the side, watching anxiously.

“Our friend here is a monk abandoned by his order, thrown out in disgrace for possessing visions of the future to terrible to be reconciled with God. Tell us, enlighten us--what have you seen?”

Cuyler led Dean by the elbow and left him right in front of the crowd.

Dean was hesitant, his face lost and afraid. His features seemed to be shrinking, and his voice trembled. “Next year, there will be a tyrant born....”

“Oh, there's one born every year,” Cuyler said, and the crowd laughed. “Tell us something more.”

“He will murder millions,” Dean replied in a hurt voice like a child.

“That's all well and good, brother,” Cuyler retorted, “but I think we would rather hear about what wonders the future will offer us.”

The crowd applauded this, and Dean looked to Perlez, but he had turned away from the crowd, unable to watch.

“In the future, there will be no violence,” Dean said softly, “and we will control time. We will bend it backwards and try to heal the sickness of the past, and we will fail, we will fail....”

Anxiously, Cuyler tried to egg Dean back on track. People in the audience were muttering amongst each other, steadily losing interest in this doddering, meek prophet. “But what of the fantastic machines of the future?” Cuyler asked. “What great devices will make our lives better? What great scientific leaps will improve our lives?”

But Dean was too stupefied by the crowd to respond to his cues. “You mean insulin?

Several people in the crowd began to boo, and Dean looked like he would cry. Cuyler grabbed him by the arm roughly and led him away. “Remember, I did say he was mad,” he cautioned the audience as he left Dean behind the carriage. “But now for the final exhibit, one that shall surely live in infamy in this fair town's history....”

Behind the carriage, Dean took off his robe and tossed it down on the ground. He started wandering the streets, strangely empty of people. It occurred to him that this is how streets sometimes appear in dreams, devoid of human life save for the dreamer. The existence of other people in such a state could only be assumed. But he knew Perlez was out there and would find him, so he wandered.

The streets of this town seemed like loose strings all leading to the square at the centre. Some were cobblestone and others still dirt; some filled with houses and others filled with shops. Dean followed one--it didn't matter which one, they were all the same to him--and found himself walking a long curved street, unable to turn away or find a different path. The houses were so close together that you couldn't squeeze between them and there were no side streets to escape down. If you wanted to escape, you had to enter a house. And when you entered that house, you would play the role it assigned to you. Enter it as a stranger. Enter it as a husband or son, lover or murderer, worker or thief. But you always enter it as something.

Dean walked, following the street until he found himself on the outskirts of town. The afternoon sun was shining brightly and the coolness in the air was barely noticeable. Dean sat down against a barren tree and watched the town.

A couple hours later, Dean finally spotted his colleague. Perlez was walking down the street, looking from house to house as if he expected Dean to be watching from a window. When he spotted Dean, started walking quickly towards the outskirts of the town.

“There you are.” Confused, he asked, “Why are you waiting out here?”

“I knew you would find me eventually,” Dean explained calmly, “so I just stopped here.”

There was a flash of irritation on Perlez's face at this explanation, but he said nothing. Instead, he pulled a few coins out of his pocket. “Bernhard gave us these, although he said he doubted we had earned them.” After a pause, he added, “We're fired.”

“I thought I quit,” Dean said.

“It makes no difference.” Perlez looked down at Dean. The man seemed so relaxed, despite having been so close to another meltdown. His face was not pale and his body did not shake, even though the wind was picking up and made Perlez shiver. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Dean replied, sounding a little surprised at himself.

Perlez nodded. “Good. Then we should be going.”

Dean stood and he pointed in a direction. “That's north, isn't it?”

Without a word, Perlez started walking, and Dean kept pace beside him, following through the trees, the leaves crunching under foot and the empty branches like claws. And if the wind from the north bit down hard, the two men paid it no mind. They walked between its teeth.