TIME IS AN ONION

 

Richard Blaine continues his conversation with Winston Churchill.

"If mankind is to continue in other than this present barbarism, 

a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than mere technology." 

- Sentient

TIME IS AN ONION

“Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.”

- Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

 

Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today. I was tired of gray. I was tired of a lot of things that were not about to go away.

Then, as so often happened when life proved too much, I heard the velvet voice of Helen Mayfair:

“If you ever loved anything in your life, try to remember it. If you ever betrayed anything, pretend for a moment that you have been forgiven."

I almost felt her hand lightly caress my cheek as it did on that faraway day.

 "If you ever feared anything, pretend for an instant that those days are gone and will never return. Buy the lie and hold to it for as long as you can. Press your favorite memory, whatever it may be, to your breast and stroke it till it purrs.”

Winston Churchill stiffened, “Your eyes. They’ve become so haunted. I am sorry, young man. Lucy is right. I am more prone to bursts of temper of late.”

He looked morosely at my heavily bandaged hands. “Anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.”

I shook my head and was afraid I only managed a sad smile. “I was merely hearing the voice of my own Lucy, Helen Mayfair. I … will never see her again outside of my memories. And that knowledge is a bleeding wound inside me.”

He looked intently at me. “Is she dead, then?”

“No, sir. But I have so many powerful enemies ….”

“Good! That means you have stood your ground for what you believed was right. Eisenhower is but a man. Well, the man I see before me is not dead, is he? So, there is hope. Cling to that hope, nourish the love that you feel, and let your enemies be damned!”

He sucked in a deep breath. “I feel better already. I must put you on my staff.”

I smiled, thinking he was making a jest. I was wrong.

An impish sparkle gleamed in his eyes. “Yes, that is exactly what I will do! I will make you and your ‘Spartan 3oo’ my official liaison between my office and that pompous Supreme Commander.”

The Prime Minister slapped his hand on my left shoulder. “I will even make Nurse Rachel Reynolds my aide as a courier of sorts to speak between us.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

Cloverfield sighed, “General Eisenhower put pressure on the hospital to let her go as she went aboard the Rocinante without official sanction.”

“But she and Doc Tennyson saved ….”

“Over a thousand soldiers between them and your efforts … at least according to that journalist … ah, what was his name again?”

“Walter Cronkite, sir,” said Cloverfield.

The New Zealander shook his head. “But he claims he did not write those articles that the McCord Newspaper Chain is printing under his by-line. In fact, he visited the Major’s hospital room after those MP’s escorted you off the floor. He was yelling he had been betrayed by the United Press.”

Churchill snorted, “That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.”

I look back at that exchange now and mourn how naïve we all were then, how ignorant of the horrors the war years would bring.

In the mirrors of many judgments, my hands are the color of blood.

I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils.  

And on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe … on that day when the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I, too, will go down into darkness, swallowing remorse for things done … and for things not done often enough.

Until then, I will continue bloodying my hands and refuse to let them hang useless.

Cloverfield frowned. “Speaking of those MP’s they’re running all around us as if good sense had left them. They don’t bloody look as if they even see us.”

I sighed, “Sentient just told me that she has slipped the three of us an onion layer back in time.”

Churchill snorted, “Is such a thing possible?”

I nodded. “Time is not the linear concrete concept Einstein believes. It does not easily fit into a black and white world of equations that runs to a logical conclusion.”

I bit my lower lip. “Time is … an onion of sorts. It exists whole as one unit. No beginning. No end. It does not run on and on. It has … layers which Sentient can slip between … which how she took me 413 years in the future to get these strange new hands.”

I started to run those bandaged fingers through my unruly hair and just managed to stop myself in time.

“In time.”

I grinned drily at the phrase. The three of us were “in time” indeed.

Churchill snorted again. “Are you, then, smarter than Einstein?”

“Sentient has made it so.”

“You do not talk like a genius.”

I shook my head. “My enemy in New Orleans uses language as a blunt instrument to batter those with whom he speaks to prove how much smarter he is than they. But I believe he is trying to prove something else entirely different to himself. Just what I haven’t quite decided.”

I remembered Helen groaning at what I called the vocabulary I used.

 “I speak in what I call ‘Jimmy Stewart’ English. If I can imagine the actor saying it on the screen, I say it to others. To me, language is meant to clearly communicate one to another without needlessly labyrinthine terms.”

James Cloverfield shook his head. “You know what is truly frightening?”

“What?”

“I believe you.”