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.