The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 13

Some seventy or so years later, Phearson sat across the table from me in that manor house in Northumbria and grew angry as I said, “Complexity should be your excuse for inaction. The complexity of events, the complexity of time–what good is this knowledge to you?”

It was raining outside, a hard, relentless downpour that had come after two days of stifling heat, an unclenching from the sky. Phearson had gone to London; on his return, he had brought more questions and a less yielding attitude.

“You’re holding back!” he belted. “You say all these things will happen, but you don’t say how. You talk of computers and telephones and the goddamn end of the Cold War but you don’t give us shit on how any of it works. We’re the good guys–we’re here to make things better, do you see? A better world!”

When angry a blue vein like a writhing snake stood out on his left temple, and his face, rather than growing red, grew greyish pale. I considered his accusations and felt a not inconsiderable part of them to be baseless. I was no historian; the events of the future had unfolded as actions in the present with little time for retrospective analysis or contemplation, but rather as news stories told on the TV in sixty-second chunks. I could no further explain the functioning of the home computer than I could balance a kipper on the end of my nose.

And yes, I was holding back–not on all things, but on some. I had read about the Cronus Club, and the primary lesson I had learned was that it was a place of silence. If its members were like me, if they knew the future, at least as it pertained to their personal lifelines, then they had the power to affect it outright. Yet they chose not to do so. And why?

“Complexity,” I repeated firmly. “You and I are merely individuals. We cannot control massive socio-economic events. You may try to tamper, but to alter even one event, even in the smallest possible way, will invalidate every other event that I have ever described. I can tell you that the trade unions will suffer under Thatcher, but in truth I cannot pin down the economic forces behind this phenomenon, or explain in a glib few words why society permits its industries to be destroyed. I can’t tell you what is in the minds of the people who dance at the fall of the Berlin Wall, or exactly who will stand up in Afghanistan and say, ‘Today is a good day for jihad.’ And what good is my information to you, if acting on a single piece of it destroys the whole?”

“Names, places!” he exclaimed. “Give me names, give me places!”

“Why?” I asked. “Will you assassinate Yasser Arafat? Will you execute children for crimes they haven’t committed yet, arm the Taliban in advance?”

“That’s a policy decision, these are all policy decisions…”

“You’re making your decisions based on crimes which haven’t been committed yet!”

He threw his arms wide in a great gesture of frustration. “Humanity is evolving, Harry!” he exclaimed. “The world is changing! In the last two hundred years humanity has changed in ways more radical than it achieved in the last two thousand! The rate of evolution is accelerating, as a species and as a civilisation. It’s our job, the job of good men, good men and good women, to oversee this process, to guide it so that we don’t have any more fuck-ups and disasters! You want another Second World War? Another Holocaust? We can change things, make them better.”

“You regard yourself as fit to oversee the future?”

“Goddamn it, yes!” he roared. “Because I’m a fucking defender of democracy! Because I’m a fucking liberal-minded believer in freedom, because I’m a fucking good guy with a good heart and damn it because someone has to!”

I sat back in my chair. The rain was slicing in sideways, pounding against the glass. There were fresh flowers on the table, cold coffee in my cup. “I’m sorry, Mr Phearson,” I said at last. “I don’t know what it is you want me to tell you.”

He shuffled round quickly on to a chair, pulled it closer to me, dropping his voice to an almost conspiratorial level, hands pressed down in a might-be apology. “Why don’t we win in Vietnam? What are we doing wrong?”

I groaned, pressing my palms against my skull. “You’re not wanted! The Vietnamese don’t want you, the Chinese don’t want you, your own people don’t want you in Vietnam! There’s no winning a war no one wants to fight!”

“What if we dropped the bomb? One bomb, Hanoi, a clean sweep?”

“I don’t know because it never happened, and it never happened because it’s obscene!” I shouted. “You don’t want knowledge, you want affirmation, and I…” I stood suddenly, as surprised to find myself standing as anyone else in the room. “… I can’t give you that,” I concluded. “I’m sorry. I thought when I agreed to this that you were… that you wanted something else. I think I was wrong. I need… to think.”

Silence between us.

In Chinese, asthma is described as the panting of an animal, its breath heavy with illness. Phearson’s body was statue-still, his hands carved to civilised containment, his suit straight, his face empty, but his breath was all animal bursting up from within his chest. “What is the point of you?” he asked, and the words were shaped by years of polite upbringing, careful self-control, and the breath that drove it wanted to rip my throat out with bare teeth and swallow blood. “You think this doesn’t matter, Dr August? You think you die and that’s it? The world resets, bang!” A slam of his hand into the table, hard enough to make china cups bounce in porcelain saucers. “Us little men with little lives are dead and gone, and all this–” he didn’t need to move, didn’t need to do more than flick his eyes around the room “–was just a dream. Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted? Do you?”

He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his voice, but the animal breath came fast even as his fingers tightened against their own instinct to tear. I found I had nothing. No words, no ideas, no justification, no rebuke. He stood suddenly, sharply, a breaking of a sort, though of what I didn’t dare say, the vein on his temple writhing busily beneath his skin. “OK.” He panted the word out. “OK, Dr August. OK. We’ve both got a little tired, a little frustrated… Maybe we need a break. Why don’t we take the rest of the day off and you can think about it, OK? OK,” he decided before I could answer. “That’s a plan. Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

So saying, he strode from the room without another word and without looking back.