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.

Anonymous pamphlet found in bus shelter, part 1 of 5

Just a brief note: I found the following text in a bus shelter on 107th Street and 82nd Avenue (you might know it--it's the one in front of the church). The pamphlet was just sitting there on top of a copy of the Watchtower, and something about its bland format--plain text on white paper, no illustrations, not even a title--immediately drew me to it. And what a strange, farcical tale was contained within that dull vessel! Time travel, Hitler, World War II? Who ever heard of such things? A second world war? Can you even imagine? The author doesn't bother explaining these fantasies, apparently assuming we are completely aware of all of this. Maybe that is what unnerves me: why does the author assume we should know about his or her private delusions? But this is, I suppose, the very definition of madness, so I should not be surprised.

Strangely, I've never seen copies anywhere other than this one bus shelter, and the pamphlets stopped appearing after the fifth installment. What did the author hope to accomplish with this little tale? Did he or she actually believe what was written, or was it all just for private amusement? Who can say? I will share with you what I found in the hopes that it may do you more good than it did me. In the meantime, I walk past that corner of 82nd and 107th every day, watching and waiting for a sixth installment that will at last explain why I can't stop reading the first five.

Do not consider this a warning. There are simply some things that must be said about the state of the world and why everything is as it now exists. It is understandable that you would distrust this pamphlet. But understand this: everything written on these pages is the truth, and your distrust will not alter its veracity.

People often forget where they come from. True, you remember the name and the location, but these markers do nothing to evoke a place in time and space. You can return to your birthplace over and over again, but nothing will be the same. Each return will only change it further. As you try to grasp it, the original slides through your fingers. Hold tighter. It disappears. You forget.

This pamphlet (and others that will follow) shall attempt to explain how it is that someone can return to that origin, and the problems arising from such an action. This is not a warning, but there are powerful lessons to be learned from the failures of the two men who shall be discussed. Their names, unfortunately, are unknown. For that reason, they have been arbitrarily assigned the following names: David Perlez and Benedict Dean.

As exemplary scientists of their era, Perlez and Dean were often involved in discussions of how to improve the past. With humanity having at last succeeded in suppressing its most vile inclinations of war and violence, all that remained was to extend this project into the past. Most amateurs students of time are well aware of the seemingly infinite hypothetical dilemmas that such retroactive tampering can cause, chief among these being: if we change the past for the better, how do we know this will not change the future for the worse, and thus make any tampering an impossibility in the first place? In that case, everything resets to zero and the cycle begins again.

Perlez and Dean, as well as many of their colleagues, foresaw none of these problems. As is typical of such endeavours, the good intentions overwhelmed all critical assessments to such a point that the initial good intent was practically negated. Consider this the first lesson: a good intention devoid of proper intelligence and rational context may not lead to a good result. In other words, a good deed that exists in a vacuum is not necessarily good.

The problem faced by the scholars was this: how could a future of pacifism hope to correct a past of violence? You cannot simply go into the past and lecture its inhabitants about good behaviour and the merits of peace. The past is quite capable of lecturing itself on exactly these subjects, and it is more likely to listen to itself than to some pious denizen of the future spreading peace through technological superiority.

Discussions centred on the difficult case of World War II, the “good” war in which violence supposedly earned its keep. Escalating bloodshed can actually lead to peace, at least by the terms of this conflict. To the pacifists of the future, such a notion would seemingly put the lie to their whole civilization, which was based on the idea that violence begets violence. How then to stop World War II with only the tools of a pacifist culture?

Dr. Adams would attempt to theorize an answer at an international convention of scientists devoted to solving this very problem. With the aid of time travel, he would argue, the violent intentions of the past could be subverted by the peaceful intentions of the future. By altering the origins of the event, they could drastically lessen, if not completely change, the severity of the outcome. However, the origin must be localized in a single nexus; you cannot simply change the entire social and political framework of the era, which would also quite naturally be heading in the direction of war.

Hitler, of course, was seen as the logical target. Without his leadership, the chances of Germany starting the second world war lessened dramatically, and even if it still engaged in battle, the chances were quite high that the war would be shortened greatly. There was only a small percent of possible outcomes in which the war turned out just as bad or worse, and these were dismissed as statistical nullities.

Of course, the thought of assassinating Hitler was discarded outright as not fitting the principles of this experiment. The change had to be peaceful and minimally impact the normal flow of history. One could not simply insert a new figure into Hitler’s life--say, a pacifist art teacher who might instil a strong enough moral code to combat the societal factors that would push history over the brink. Such a gambit was too risky, as it created an entirely unknown factor with repercussions that could not be calculated. The figure would be too visible. The normalizing pressures of the era would naturally target such a contrary force; the presence of this figure might result in an escalation of the very problem it was trying to counteract.

It was decided that the change had to be internal. Somehow, they had to alter Hitler in such a way that it seemed the man had changed himself. Brainwashing was not viable, as the results had to last the entirety of Hitler’s life. He had to be left a functioning human being still capable of engaging with his society, even as he rebuffed its advances towards war.

The proposed solution to this problem became known as the Adams Hypothetical. According to Dr. Adams, the surest way to change the personality of Hitler was to somehow alter his body. The reasoning was simple: the change would only affect Hitler’s person while not creating any new external factors in the history of the man. If the change was discreet, it would not be noticed by people of the epoch, and any resulting changes to Hitler’s persona would be credited to the free will of the man and not any external meddling.

The next part of the Adams Hypothetical was more contentious. Dr. Adams posited that the best option would be to improve Hitler’s body in some discreet fashion. If his monstrous, pathological sense of control and dominance came from a personal feeling of weakness and inferiority, then surely removing this weakness and inferiority would undermine the more deranged characteristics of the man. For this reason, Dr. Adams argued, the only logical course of action was to give Hitler a second testicle.

The gathered scholars and scientists were at first incensed by such a preposterous theory, but Dr. Adams would not be dissuaded from his conviction that history could be altered through such intimate and impolite methods. His steadiness and hypnotic logic could not be easily dismissed. As every male in the room knew, such a radical alteration could have grave effects on the psyche of even the most well-balanced, self-assured man. Just consider the salutary effects on an imbalanced, neurotic individual such as Hitler, who no doubt craved some sort of compensation for his biological deficiency--how could anyone doubt the merits of such a plan?

Although the rumblings of discontent were never fully quieted, the Adams Hypothetical was broadly accepted by the group as sound enough to stand up to testing. Of course, there would be risks. Due to technological limitations, the individuals chosen to participate could never return to the future. Once in the past, they remained there.

Volunteers were obviously not forthcoming. Perlez and Dean, however, felt they themselves duty-bound to carry out this theory. When both men agreed to the mission, they were required to write a justification for their actions in order to help ensure the honour of their intentions and soundness of their minds. As Perlez stated: “It is not enough to believe something is right. You have to actually be willing to live it, to make that principle a condition of your own reality. The Adams Hypothetical seems to me such an inarguable truth that I feel I would be a liar if I did not try to adhere to it. I have no doubt in our success.” His sentiments, albeit in less zealous terms, were echoed by the general populace.

However, some dissent did exist. One attendee at that the conference that birthed the Adams Hypothetical wrote a minority opinion which is quoted here: “In the past, how many wars arose from one culture applying its value system to another culture that could not abide any such imposition? What is war but the failure of two world views to coalesce into one? Are we not doing the same here, by forcing a peace on these people that may not be able to tolerate it and might not even understand it? This arrogance undermines everything.”

That opinion, signed by a Dr. Hulse, might have had some effect on public opinion if it had not been suppressed by the members of the majority, who felt it might undermine the success of the mission. Unfortunately, Dr. Hulse seemed to accept this censure with none of the fire displayed in his written dissent; nothing is known of him after he wrote those words. Accepting that history would be corrupted, Hulse apparently took the route of an ascetic and withdrew from it.

Little can be said of the physical and mental preparations of Perlez and Dean in the months leading up to the mission. For obvious reasons, this poisonous technology must be omitted from the narrative, if only to prevent others from deducing its design from the details. Still, it must be said that the strain of the process was incredible, and the two men were well chosen for standing up to its rigours.

Indeed, the two men had to display incredible fortitude, for they were essentially sacrificing their entire lives to the success of this mission. Because they could never return, they would essentially have their entire lives to fulfill the mission. After careful examination of all eventualities, it was agreed that the initial attempt should take place during Hitler’s earliest days, before he would even be consciously aware of his lack. The men would aim for Austria in the year 1889, although the general lack of precision inherent in the technology was a large concern. Much as the precision of a thrown object decreases over distance, so too does it decrease over time. It was simplicity itself to travel back one year; one hundred years or more proved more problematic.

The simplest solution would be to aim for 1888 or 1887, but there was nothing simple about this method. You could try to reach Austria in 1887 and reach China in 1877. Even if you got the right year, you could get the wrong place, and vice versa. Even worse, there was a danger that if Perlez and Dean appeared to far into the past, they would not survive until the time they could act. Everything could fail that easily.

Communication with the future was another dilemma, although one more readily addressed. The future would not necessarily know if the experiment was a failure, and there needed to be some way for the pair to present their findings to the future. The obvious, and perhaps only, method was a time capsule. A spot in the countryside not far from the city of Hof was chosen after a careful analysis of historical record suggested the capsule had a fair chance of remaining undisturbed there. Of course, even this was not certain. It would not take much to destroy this fragile line of communication: a stray mortar during a battle, or even just someone digging a hole for a fence post.

All of these uncertain factors did nothing to bring the methodology of the mission into question. Maybe if there had been some dissenters who could have harnessed these doubts, everything would have turned out better. The mission might have been called into question as a foolhardy example of temporal imperialism. But in the hands of the faithful, all doubt is made meaningless. Perlez and Dean prepared for their mission, and everyone regarded them as heroes.

When the day came, they were surrounded by media. Perlez commented that he hoped the public would not forget what they had done, even though he knew that was a possible outcome. Dean, as usual the less articulate of the pair, merely said that he was excited and anxious to do his duty. Both men saluted the gathered crowd, and the crowd roared its approval. School children in their classrooms all watched on screen. Traffic paused and even the ambulances were still. The man dying in the back could come to life in a few seconds, there was just such a sense of possibility. Businesses all froze to a halt, some in mid-transaction, with money out in the open as one person passed it to another. A thief could have simply picked it up and walked away without fear of being chased. But even the thieves were glued to their screens, watching to see what would exist in a few seconds. They could all be made rich beyond their wildest imaginings, or plunged into an unthinkable hell (which, naturally enough, no one thought of).

The first discernible feature of the past was silence. The two men stood in a forest of unknown location (temporally or physically) at some point late at night. The stars were out; the night was clear and cool. Judging by the constellations, they agreed that they had at least reached the correct region of the world. But how close were they to Braunau, their target city? And what year was it?

Gathering their supplies, they wandered in an arbitrarily chosen direction, hoping to find a road or some other indication of civilization. After half an hour of wandering in the moonlight, they came across a fence, which quite naturally lead them to a farm.

There were several buildings, including what appeared to be a small peasant farm house, but there were no lights on anywhere. Perlez left his backpack with Dean and crept up to the home to investigate.

It was a single-room farm house, with two people (husband and wife, he assumed) sleeping in the only bed in the building. There appeared to be three others sleeping on straw mattresses on the floor, and the sound of wood crackling came from the stove. A couple of candles sat on the table and an oil lantern hung on the wall. On the shadowed walls, he saw no calendar and no clocks. How did these people know what time it was, he wondered. Did they even know what time was?

It was a possibility that he would have to face, and one that would make his task much more difficult, for how could he orient himself in time if no one in this era knew how to do so? Troubled, he ran back to Dean, slipping on the dewy grass and catching himself against a tree. He broke the news to his colleague: there would be no help for them here. The people in the farm house must still live like savages, knowing time only as a natural phenomena and not a malleable commodity. In the future, they could control and alter time, shift it to suit their purposes and measure it out in doses. For these people, time was the difference between night and day, spring and winter. Time was the name for the thing that existed between an old man in his chair and an old man in his grave; it tethered these two disparate states. “Remember the time…?”

Their only hope was to find a city, if such things existed now. Only in a centre of commerce and community could they hope to find something resembling time as they knew it. If there was a city, there was a business, and if there was a business, there was a man counting out his seconds in pennies.

Following a well-worn path away from the farm house, Perlez and Dean eventually stumbled across what appeared to be a road. It was not paved, but it had obviously seen a lot of traffic. Ruts opened up in it and little pools formed from the precipitation. Dean pointed at one and remarked that he would come to that canyon when he was six. His eyes started to tear up and he dropped to his knees. He wanted to put his hand in the rut and dig out a few handfuls of dirt.

Of course, this was not the canyon he had visited when he was six; canyons do not form so rapidly. Even the strongest constitution could fall prey to such disorientation--with all of the usual reference points gone, time and space collapsed in the mind, leaving Dean’s memories unmoored. It was a kind of dementia--not permanent, but a very real problem nonetheless--and Perlez was no less susceptible to it. He said nothing but picked up his colleague, and the two walked together down the road.

After a couple of hours of walking, a city finally came into view. It seemed to be of modest size, but it was most definitely a city, and seemingly one from the correct era. All hope was not lost. They might yet be on time.

The sun was rising as they neared the city, gilding the dust on the road and making the buildings appear slightly unreal, like a painted backdrop. But the people were unmistakably real, a living mass of flesh and eyes watching each other, watching Perlez and Dean, watching everything but the sky, which they had not yet learned to distrust.

It didn’t take long to find a dry goods store. Perlez entered, while Dean stayed in the street. The shop owner was placing jars containing various coloured confections on top of the counter, and he merely glanced at Perlez, muttered a hello, and then went back to his organizing. When Perlez asked what city they were in, the shop owner did not answer, but simply asked where he was from.

Perlez hesitated. Where could he be from if he didn’t know where he was? Trying to hide his embarrassment, he said that he was from “out west,” not really knowing how else to bluff his way through this conversation. The shop owner guessed that this meant Innsbruck, but after a bit of struggling to recall a map of Austria, Perlez ventured that he was from Schwaz. The shop owner shrugged at this, perhaps not even knowing that name, but it seemed sufficient: Kufstein, he said, the city’s name was Kufstein.

Perlez thanked him and purchased some hard candy. As he stood at the counter, he saw the calendar on the wall behind the shop owner: September, 1888. The days were not marked, so he could not tell the exact date, but at least he had his bearings now. He withdrew the appropriate coinage from his pocket and paid the man.

Out in the street, Dean had wandered away. Worried about his shell-shocked comrade, Perlez scanned about the growing crowd of day labourers and market goers, and he felt his own grasp on time slowly slipping. Were they in 1888 or some medieval market square? What if these people measured the past differently and their 1888 was his 1458? Everything held together with so little: just a bit of faith to glue all of this doubt together, and then you just drop the damn thing and it shatters anyway. Something must be wrong.

He saw Dean standing at the fringe of a crowd, watching some spectacle that could not be seen through all the bobbing heads. Perlez rushed over and asked what was happening.

“A demonstration,” Dean said simply.

In front of the crowd, a man in a black, wrinkled suit was speaking. He stood on a wooden crate in front of a storefront with the window closed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a wave of his arm, granting the audience leave to applaud themselves, which they did, “ladies and gentlemen, science has given us so many marvels that I could simply list them all day and leave you humbled and amazed.

“But I do not aim so low. In fact, I wish to show you the greatest miracle science has yet to produce, something which you shall be able to tell your grandchildren, ‘I saw it before all others.’ When they write the history books, you will be on the first page, for all that came before shall be made meaningless by this, the latest and greatest triumph of science.”

At this point, the man rose his arms in a triumphant flourish and the door of the shop opened. A metallic body walked out, gleaming and strange. The light in its eyes flickered erratically, like a candle caught in a draught, and an unknown force whirred and grinded in it as it moved. If the crowd had been restless with the man’s windy rhetoric, they forgot it once this indefinable creature appeared before them.

“Science,” the speaker continued, “has done much to extend the life of man, has given us all creature comforts unthinkable to our forebears. But now science has surpassed us all with this creation, a more perfect, undying version of ourselves. Think of the possibilities? Manual labour would be a thing of the past. Marxists speak of workers losing their chains? This is the liberator! Employers wonder where good help will come from? Wonder no more! This being can do everything for us, never tire, never sleep, never cease to make our lives better, easier, richer!”

“How much can it lift?” one man in the crowd shouted.

“Would someone care to step forward for a brief demonstration?” the speaker asked. “I assure you, our metallic friend is as harmless as he is helpful. You, madam, please step forward, and fear not, for he is a gentleman too.”

A plumper woman stepped forward a bit awkwardly. The metallic man bent down with a grinding noise and held out his arm for her, which, under the direction of the speaker, she sat upon. With little discernable effort, the metallic man stood up, holding the woman on his arm the whole time. The crowd gasped.

“Fraud, fraud,” Perlez whispered to Dean. “This can’t be happening.”

Dean said nothing, attention rapt by the demonstration, but the speaker caught the sound of dissent quite quickly. “You should come forward then if you doubt,” he said. “I will do my level best to assuage your concerns.”

Some of the audience members laughed at Perlez’s scepticism as he passed, others jeered the speaker, but no one was walking away just yet.

“You seem like a man of some education,” declared the speaker.

“I suppose I am,” replied Perlez.

“How then would you explain our metallic friend?”

“I would assume you just put a man in a metal suit.”

The speaker snapped his fingers and the metallic man held out his right arm. Grabbing the wrist, the speaker fiddled around for a moment, like he was removing a bracelet, and then snapped off the hand and passed it to Perlez. “Will this suffice as proof?” The crowd roared with laughter, while people throughout murmured in amazement.

Irritated, Perlez swatted the hand away. It fell on the ground and the crowd stepped back from it. Not waiting for the speaker to act, Perlez rushed at the metallic man, grabbed the right arm, and twisted it as if he were trying to do a judo throw. The arm snapped out of its socket. He threw it on the ground next to the hand and began pulling gears out of the shoulder socket, gears and pinions and little screws, and no man, no flesh. He grew desperate, reaching inside the socket as the speaker and the crowd watched in dumb amazement as this stranger tried to dismantle the greatest triumph of science. “This can’t exist,” he said flatly. To the assembled crowd, this sounded not like incredulity but a judgement.

The metallic man did nothing as Perlez tore at it; the thing simply toppled over and fell on the ground, eyes still flickering. Some members of the crowd booed and the speaker put up his hands, piously declaring, “Small minds have always inhibited progress.”

“You’re a fraud,” Perlez said, wandering away, stunned. Dean rushed after him.

The speaker ignored this provocation, instead focusing his energies on the unsettled crowd, which threatened to dissipate. “Of course, there are always sceptics,” he said with a smile. “You can tell the greatness of an idea by how violently people oppose it.”

Perlez did not bother to respond. He was shaken, giving in to the disorientation that had gripped Dean earlier.

The reaction had been delayed, but it hit him now, brutally. Like standing in the middle of a flat field and suddenly finding the ground beneath your feet gone and you in freefall, all sense of cohesion is gone. Nothing is where it should be--not your memories, your dreams, your self. The world becomes a place of infinite possibility, and as such, deeply, strangely horrifying.

No, that is not enough, reader. It does not convey the bottomless feeling Perlez found himself inside. Instead, imagine waking up deaf. At first, you don’t realize what is happening. Quiet morning, you think. Where are the birds? That top step doesn’t creak anymore, when did that happen, how lucky. And then you see mouths moving and you don’t know what is being said, and you start screaming, and then you realize you can no longer hear yourself. Then you hear the silence you will listen to for the rest of your life, and that moment, that collapse, is what Perlez experienced.

He pushed his way into a house, throwing open the door and walking inside. A woman shouted at him to get out. “I’ve been in here before,” he said, reeling about the room. “I think my father was born there.” He pointed at a bedroom. “He died somewhere else.” The woman hit him in the chest, trying to shove him out of the house. “I think he’s buried beneath here.” He fell to the floor and the woman kicked him in the ribs; he didn’t even notice.

Dean ran in and put himself between Perlez and the woman. “He’s just drunk, don’t worry, I’ll take him away,” Dean said, holding her back. “Filth!” she shouted and spat on Perlez.

“And now it’s raining,” he said plaintively. Dean put his arm around his colleague and led him away, the woman following closely behind just in case they had any illusions about their welcome in this home.

They walked further down the street until they came to a park. The trees were bare-limbed and held their emaciated branches up to the sky. It could have been a pagan ritual. In a quiet area, they stopped as Perlez vomited, Dean holding him up so that he wouldn’t fall into the viscid pool. When he was done, Perlez wiped his chin and sat back against a tree. Dean sat beside him.

“This doesn’t seem right,” Perlez said.

“Our presence has probably changed things already,” Dean admitted.

“That,” agreed Perlez, “or else we never knew what to expect in the first place. There are surely countless aspects of this era that never made it into the history books.”

“But something as significant as--”

“No,” Perlez cut him off. “We must assume that we know nothing of the era beyond what is in the past.”

“Then when are we?”

“1888,” Perlez leaned his head back, breathing in, still feeling nauseous. “We’re in Kufstein, Austria, September 1888.”

The two men said nothing for a while. The day was warming under the light of the sun, and it appeared to be a tranquil autumn day. A stray dog wandered near, circling a bit at first and then, after seeing how still the two men were, cautiously stole a few licks at the puddle of vomit in the leaves. At first it would withdraw and then dart in close again before pulling back, but it grew bolder under the indifference of Perlez and Dean and stayed longer each time, pulled back less each time. Finally, Perlez threw some stones. The dog yelped as one hit it directly on the hind and it withdrew, watching the two from a distance.

“We need to go,” Perlez declared.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said, and stood up to prove it.

Dean eyed him warily, not fully trusting this show of determination, but he agreed that they needed to start travelling to Braunau. Inertia would drag them further into dementia, while moving through this strange world was the only way to acclimatize to it. Slowly, the disorientation would vanish, and the oddities could be taken on face value without threat of a psychological collapse.

The two men headed out into the city. It was difficult at first, and at times it seemed they were wading through tar, slowly being sucked down with each step. What was most painful were the voices--screaming, shouting, hoarse laughter, sly whispers, angry, happy, bitter, joking. The noise shocked their ears. People argued in the street. “How dare you charge me that much to repair a shoe, that’s pure robbery!” “I told you the price beforehand, don’t you dare accuse me, I’m an honest man, which is more than anyone could say for you!” A man hit his wife once, on the back of the head, and she gave him a sharp kick to the knee. He leaned against a wall for support as he held his leg and his wife stormed off, muttering curses while he shouted obscenities at her. A few people watched, but most just tried to ignore it and carry on their own conversations, each a promise of violence in itself.

These were not the streets of the future; both men felt the difference deeply and it shook their faith in the mission in a way that neither had yet experienced. After all, both men were aware of Dr. Hulse’s dissent--both had read those words and remembered them now. “…and might not even understand it?” These people lived in a state of war. They existed in total conflict--with the world, with others, with themselves. A man in rags grabbed a woman imploringly but her husband shoved him away. The man fell to the ground and his hurt look turned to blankness, staring into the distance at an unseen horizon. He fell back, seized, his body writhing and mouth foaming. People ran away. Their bodies had not yet betrayed them. The mutiny in this one man could spread to them.

If you took this all away, would they understand why? Or, like a child losing their favourite toy, would they simply cry harder, wail louder? All of this doubt was a burden too heavy to carry any further. The two men searched for an inn of some sort. They needed to rest.

Hesitantly, Perlez approached a stranger. “Excuse me, we’re looking for an inn--”

“Oh!” exclaimed the stranger, a middle-aged man dressed quite neatly in a long coat. “You’re that person from the demonstration.”

Perlez shot Dean an anxious look and nodded.

“You must have been paid by that shyster, right? It all seemed like part of the act.”

Perlez gave the man a sickly smile. “Yes, that’s right, but don’t tell anyone.”

The man winked at him. “Oh, of course.”

“Now, can you direct us to some sort of inn?”

The man pointed down the street. “Head up that way and turn left on the third avenue up there. There’s a decent little place a few blocks down.”

The inn was exactly where the man said it would be. Like so many of the other buildings, it was dirty, covered in dust and chimney soot, but it seemed hospitable. A man behind the counter welcomed them warmly and chatted innocently about the weather, the slow business, and whatever other random thoughts seemed to pass through his head. Somewhere in this, Perlez managed to offer the man some money and get a key to a room.

Located on the third floor of the building, the room itself was meagre by their usual standards of luxury, but the austerity was actually welcomed by the two men. They had experienced enough out there; an empty room would help them recuperate. There were two single beds and a table with two chairs and a couple of candles. Opposite the beds was a small stove with a full box of wood beside it. After lighting the stove, they sat down at the table. Both men slouched in their chairs.

“So what do we do?” Dean asked, if only to break the silence.

Perlez pulled out a map of Austria and Germany from his coat pocket and spread it out on the table. “Here is where we are,” he said, putting his thumb on Kufstein, “and here is where we go.” He put his little finger on Braunau. “We can get a train tomorrow in the morning.”

“Do we have enough?”

Perlez reached into his pocket and frowned. He pulled a few bills and coins out of his pocket. “Not much, but you should have the rest.”

Dean reached into his pocket and felt around, his eyes growing increasingly wide as he realized what had happened. “It’s all gone.”

“All of it?”

“It must have been in the crowd, a pickpocket--” Dean’s voice cracked suddenly.

Perlez tried to calm him. “We still have months to get there, it’s okay. We’ll just have to work.”

Dean nodded quietly at this. Both men had known beforehand that they would be plunged into the working world at some point. They could not simply smuggle a fortune back in time, which is what would have been required to sustain both of them through a lifetime of inflation. Even if they could have done so, it might have jeopardized the mission by making them independently wealthy among peasants. But the initial sum they brought back would have allowed them to better position themselves for integration with the world of the past. Now, they were faced with the daunting prospect of finding jobs while still struggling to walk through a city without falling ill.

Perlez looked once more at the map. “Maybe if we just set out and do day labour along the way.”

Dean nodded once more. “Yes, maybe.” Without saying anything, he walked to the bed, moving with the slow, measured gait of an old man. He laid down on a bed. “Start the stove,” he said. “I’m cold.”

Without a word, Perlez knelt before the stove, gathering the necessary equipment before him. He struck a match and lit a paper. He held it in the flue and noted that the air seemed to be flowing up already, the flame stretching upwards vainly until it flickered out. He put some wood in the stove and lit some more kindling, laying it between two cords of woods. Leaving the door half-open, he went back to the table and stared at the map some more, and the silence in the room was soon filled with the hisses and pops of burning wood. Dean laid there, staring up at the ceiling.

“Did you think it would be like this?” he asked.

Perlez stared at the map, as if it were a code to crack. He did not respond. Instead, he traced paths on the map with his fingers. How many days? Where would they stay? His mind was too tired to even attempt a guess. All he could foresee was endless trudging down a dirt road, menial labour while inching towards their goal.

“Do you find it strange that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow?” Dean asked, rolling on his side. The fire crackled as the darkness outside grew. Still, Perlez said nothing. After a while, he lit a candle and continued to stare at the map.

Dean seemed to have fallen asleep and Perlez looked over at him, this person who he would be tied to for the rest of his life. They had known each other a few years, had developed a solid and respectful working relationship during their scientific careers. The two had worked together on many projects and published papers jointly. But what did that mean now? What bothered Perlez was that the forced closeness--the secret bond that their mission represented--would drive them to hate each other. Years from now, would he be able to stand the sight of this man, knowing that Dean remembered everything that they both had given up? Alone, he could pretend he was of this time, but together, they were outcasts.

Outside in the street, he could hear noise through the window. Dean seemed undisturbed by it, just laying there in a deep, still sleep, but Perlez went to the window and looked down. A man and woman, both obviously drunk, careened through the street, the woman riding piggyback on the man as both laughed. The man stopped at a street lamp and the woman dismounted as he panted, holding himself up against the pole. The two had a brief discussion, the man whispered in her ear and she nodded. He jumped up on her back and she took a few faltering steps before falling face-first into the street. The man jumped off before she hit the ground and then helped her up as blood streamed from her nose. Appalled, she hid her face behind a handkerchief. The man held out his arm and she took it, and the two walked down the street with an unsteady dignity.

We need to leave this place, Perlez thought. They were not part of these times and it painfully showed. What would he have done if he had been out in the street? Would he have tried to help these people, who seemed to hurt each other without even knowing it? Or would he just stop and stare, frozen by his inability to see any of this as real?

He threw some wood in the stove and glanced over at Dean. The man just lay there, still as the dead. If he dreamed, he hid it well, for not a muscle twitched on his face or anywhere else on his body. But Perlez understood. As the darkness crept in, he felt the exhaustion floating over him like a fog. In such a haze, you no longer wished to move anywhere; all you longed for was stillness. Perlez blew out the candle and the darkness flooded the room.

Tomorrow, they would leave the city.