The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  Kennedy remained calm. He nudged the manuscript across the table again and said, “The man your great-grandfather spoke to in the cargo hold of the Titanic wrote this journal. His name was Jonathan Wells. As to how he came about this knowledge, it’s all here.”

  Lightholler reached out for the journal and was surprised to find that his hand was shaking. His fingers left small rings of moisture on the cover. “What is this?”

  “The memoirs of a time traveller, Captain,” Hardas replied.

  Lightholler sat back in his chair. How could these madmen have influenced people at such a high level? Who, outside of this room, knew what they were up to? Kennedy and his cronies had misled the intelligence agencies of at least four countries, all for the sake of what lay on the table before him.

  “You were right,” he said to Kennedy, rising from his seat. “I don’t believe a fucking word of it.”

  “We’ll discuss it further after you’ve read it. And don’t worry, I don’t expect you to cover all of it in one sitting.”

  “Not interested. You’ve got me here under false pretences, and I have no intention of staying.”

  “You don’t really have much choice. You’re wanted by the CBI. You’re integral to our plan, and you’re not moving from this room until I say so. So you might as well settle back and read, Captain.”

  The three Confederates left the room. He heard the tumble of a key in the lock.

  Lightholler sat there for a few minutes, the anger welling up inside him. He kicked over the chairs and gave the ashtray a backhand that swept its contents across the floor. He went to the door and kicked it. No one responded.

  He returned to the table.

  Despite all his fury he opened the journal with care. It was handwritten throughout, with bold cursive strokes. Compared to the cover, the writing within was quite clear. The first page contained a list of names. It was smudged. A thumbprint here, an ink-stained impression there. The next few pages contained widely spaced paragraphs that had been crossed out roughly. In places, the nib of the pen had torn through the coarse-cut paper, indicating the writer’s dissatisfaction.

  He sat amongst the scattered furniture, the cups and glasses and the spilt ash, and began to read.

  XXI

  March 20, 1911

  March is reasonable.

  It’s been March for the last three weeks. And before that came February.

  But the year? What the hell can I add after writing that?

  I’m beginning to forget things, important things, and memories are all I’ve left to me.

  I want to break something, but I’m haunted by the image of a spider gnawing through the scaffolding of its own web.

  March 21, 1911

  If you are reading this journal and your name is not Jonathan Wells, then one of two things has happened. Either I’ve finally forgotten. Forgotten that I was even trying to remember anything at all. Or I’m dead.

  You found this in some abandoned room or on a park bench. It might have been clutched to my chest. Either way, my recommendation is the same. Take a match and burn this fucker before you read another line.

  March 22, 1911

  Not today.

  But every word and thought that comes until you’re right again.

  It happened. It really happened.

  So deal with it, you sad, miserable little shit.

  May 24, 1911

  I’ve written journal articles in the past. (If I press the pen any harder on the paper, will it lend any greater significance to that word?) Prepared papers for various medical meetings. And in my teens I kept a diary of sorts, though it was really just a chronicle of gropings. A paper belt notched by my pen so I wouldn’t forget anyone’s name.

  The diary is long gone and the names are half-recalled, but to no purpose I can think of. I’ve been here for just on two months and already I feel my past slipping away.

  Writing down words like “past” and “time”, I think I need to devise a new lexicon because the old words have lost their meaning.

  It’s as if I’d lived my entire existence as a speck, a single dot on a page full of single dots, blindfolded, and then all of a sudden the blindfold was torn away and I found myself extending both forward and back, unfolding as a line beyond the confines of any diagram.

  And if two lines, end to end, were to look at each other, what would they see? A point of existence, a fraction of their being. That is the ignorance in which we live, in which I have lived till now.

  For some reason I don’t fully grasp, I’m beginning to forget things. My memory was never a problem before, but here, in the backwoods of a small Nevada town, I feel it all slipping away. The line behind me being slowly, inexorably erased.

  Since I am the only time traveler I’ve ever met—the only conscious one, that is—I’ve got no one to compare my experiences with. Nowhere in my years of medical experience have I encountered a syndrome that behaves similarly. Prolonged thiamine deficiency will produce extreme memory loss, and Korsakoff’s syndrome will inhibit the formation of new memories. But to have the memories slip away?

  There’s a pattern to it. My early memories are fine: childhood, school, college, all intact. But my recent memories—the seminar, the Waste Land, Gershon—are all fading away. My working theory is that it’s a psychological process rather than physiological. Regardless, I’m unfolding.

  I suppose that since I’ve been torn from everything I ever knew, I’ve lost the cues that we as human beings unconsciously rely upon. There are no planes in the sky. The cars that trundle through this small town so infrequently are rudimentary at best. There’s no television, of course. No radio. There are telephones, but I won’t be able to make a long-distance call for a while. After all, the loading coil won’t be invented until next year.

  The list could probably go on for pages, this catalogue of unmade things.

  There’s no safe harbor for my memories, so I feel compelled to moor them here. No one has ever needed a confidant as I need one now.

  My name was Jonathan Wells. I was a neurosurgeon. I have taken to calling myself Herbert since I arrived—a private joke few here would appreciate. I found a copy of The Time Machine in a dime store in Las Vegas and I keep it by the bed. I’m taking it with me when I leave town. Taking the book and leaving that name, once I’ve decided what the hell I’m going to do about all this.

  I’ll be born in New York on October 20, 1964, which makes me minus fifty-three years old. Black hair, thick and in dire need of a cut, blue eyes, bloodshot, and pale, pale skin. My reflection in the warped glass above the table might be trying on Dorian Gray for size. It neither contradicts nor supports the above statement but wavers in an approximation of my state of mind, and it isn’t pretty.

  I’d been a neurosurgeon for about two years before I started to sub-specialize. I ended up doing purely vascular work: aneurysms, vascular malformations, and of course the operation that got me here in the first place, the external-carotid to internal-carotid bypass. EC-IC for short.

  But it wasn’t always vascular. In my second year as a consultant I got into a little difficulty while operating on a lumbar spine. The dura was torn, the nerve roots obscured in the sludge of welling blood. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the operating microscope. So I made a bargain with God. I promised that if He got me out of that situation, if the patient could be spared paraplegia, I would never touch another spine again. Not as long as I lived.

  Promises, promises.

  I finished the operation. The patient eventually walked, and so did I—straight from the patient’s room to my office. I phoned the Mayo Clinic. Two months later and I was on their advanced program, and it was vascular all the way.

  I’m tired. I’m not used to writing with a nib and I can’t hang around waiting for someone to invent the ballpoint pen. Jesus, my hand is aching and I’m thinking strange thoughts.

  May 27, 1911

  I’m so fucking scared.

  I was re-reading my
last entry, thinking about the surgery I used to perform, and I picked up a knife. A dirty, tetanized knife. I was wondering if I still remembered what to do with it.

  Before I knew it, I was drawing the blade across my wrist. A shallow diagonal that would divide the radial artery at an angle, and prevent the arterial spasm that God has designed to stop us from bleeding.

  Shallow cut, little droplets of blood. But after I stopped shaking, even while I was shaking, I started to laugh. I mean, at least I remembered my anatomy. Specifically my anatomy.

  But no more knives.

  It was early February, 1999, and I’d been invited to attend a conference in Las Vegas, a seminar on cerebral ischaemia. An opportunity to get out of Boston for a while. It suited the hospital and it suited me. And hell, it was Vegas.

  I was supposed to present our unit’s experience with the EC-IC bypass. The topic was chosen as a response to recent undercurrents of doubt in the procedure’s validity. These doubts weren’t based upon the operation’s results, which were largely dependent on the experience of the unit and its surgeons, but rather in the actual indications for the operation.

  Originally the op had been designed to treat patients who’d suffered damage to the brain’s circulation. The neurological equivalent of a cardiac bypass. Conceptually quite simple. Take the blood supply of the face, head and neck, and re-route a portion of it to supply the brain directly. Technically, it was demanding. Aesthetically, it was beautiful. You marshal the body’s defences. You utilize the patient’s own “spare” tissues to aid in their reconstruction.

  Unfortunately, studies suggested that the absolute indications for the operation were diminishing. The only valid ones remaining involved the treatment of rare tumors and trauma. The operation I’d trained in, that I believed would be a staple in the management of neurological patients, was to be relegated to obscurity. And so was I. With the radiologists shoving their tubes and pipes into sealed vessels and the physicians dissolving blockages with their snake oil, my work was disappearing.

  Our paper proposed that EC-IC bypass was a significant component in the management of arterial disease in the brain. A controversial statement, and quite possibly a false one.

  I should know. I wrote it. That’s how I got to be in Vegas, and that’s why they picked me. The right person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  June 1, 1911

  Strange week, skulking around town, trying to keep a low profile. It’s a smaller world I’ve stumbled across. No one travels and no one trusts travelers and no one here could conceive of the miles behind me.

  I mustered the courage to sell some of the gold today. Enough to ensure that I had better think about moving on soon. The ingots they’d provided were small enough to be carried on my belt and had been molded to resemble freshly mined gold. The impurities might have been added, as well as the fine dust that silted the belt’s many pouches.

  I wonder if they had to erase any serial numbers in their twisted alchemy. I wonder why I’m thinking about serial numbers at all, and then of course I remember all too clearly and wonder at my wondering.

  Enough. I need to be out of here by the end of the week. I’m going to head north. I have a dead man’s promise to keep and it starts with this. Getting it all down on paper. I need to get it right too, so I can make sense of how I came to be in this place and time. A combination of my experiences, along with the things Gershon told me. Some of it’s speculation. And I suppose a bunch of it’s a crock, but it’s as close to the truth as I will ever get.

  It was late February and I’d been in Vegas two days before I got the call.

  The conference didn’t start till the next morning so I’d gone to the Flamingo. I was playing blackjack, chipping up, and the cash was flowing my way for a change. Then my cell phone began to ring. I had to leave the table to take the call, which bugged the hell out of me. No matter what the interruption is, whether they change the dealer, refill the float, or some clown spills his drink, by the time you place that next bet your luck has gone stone cold. You might as well throw your chips in a wishing well. Having said that, I can’t think of a time I ever chipped down. Always hoping to break that streak.

  I took the call.

  The speaker’s voice sounded very crisp for a cell phone; he could have been standing next to me. He introduced himself as Captain Burns and told me that I was required for an urgent consultation.

  I told him I wasn’t on call. I told him I was nowhere near Boston. But I kept it nice. I didn’t know who the guy was, and if my ex-wife’s lawyer taught me one thing it’s that it pays to know who you’re offending.

  “We know exactly where you are, Doctor,” he replied. “You’re standing approximately five feet away from pit seven, table three. Your last hand was a pair of aces. You won on the split; not bad but not wise against a picture. Incidentally,” he informed me, “your drink has just arrived.”

  I remember feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I remember asking, “What’s wrong with splitting aces?” I turned to see that a cocktail waitress had brought my bourbon to the table. The dealer was pointing me out to her.

  Burns said, “Take one card instead, you might get a seven, eight or nine. That’s a safe hand.”

  “I might get a ten and then I’m screwed.” I scanned the room. I couldn’t see anyone making a call. “Split them and I might get a picture and cover my loss. Besides, he busted.”

  “Dangerous play, relying on the other guy to fold.”

  “That’s why it’s called gambling...” I glanced up. There were cameras everywhere. It had to be a practical joke. But why? My anxiety was rapidly turning to exasperation. “Who is this?”

  “I told you who I am. We need you to help us with an injury. Our MD thinks he’s had an internal carotid artery dissection.”

  “Who gave you my number? Where are you?”

  “I’m in a car just outside the hotel lobby.”

  “What the hell are you?”

  I heard a muffled voice. Someone talking to Burns.

  “Sir, I’m Air Force, out of Nellis.” He paused. “The car is a black Oldsmobile just behind the taxis.” He hung up.

  I went back to the table and took my chips. Didn’t touch the bourbon. I was in a daze as I walked to the cashier and cashed my chips.

  I was starting to hope it was a joke.

  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I knew that because I was wearing a watch. No decent casino allows natural light in the place and no clocks. Ever. Time can only be measured in an exchange of plastic across green felt, the accumulation of butts in an ashtray. And if they’re real good, you won’t even notice that.

  Walking out of the hotel lobby, I looked around, hoping for a friendly face, but there, parked a little distance away from the taxi line, was the Olds. As I approached, the black-tinted driver’s window slowly slid down. A pale hand in a black sleeve emerged from the darkness.

  A voice called out to me. Burns’s. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  The hand disappeared, then returned, and a wallet emerged and flipped open to reveal a badge. I didn’t recognize the insignia. It was nice and shiny.

  I said, “The pleasure is all yours,” or something equally stupid.

  The rear door swung open.

  “Time is of the essence, Doctor. Please get inside.”

  At this point the edge of the map began to blur. I was entering uncharted waters. Hic sunt dracones.

  I asked, “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  His face was gaunt and pale. “Who else would we be?”

  There was a hollow chuckle from inside the car.

  Blindly, I got in.

  I’m certain that if I hadn’t done so, I would have been kidnapped. I’d like to think I never had a choice.

  The back seat was empty. The car smelled new. Burns was sitting next to the driver, and they both had the same close-cropped haircut. I was being abducted by the Bobbsey twins. The Olds pul
led away.

  I told him that I had to attend a conference the next morning, that I was giving a talk. He told me that there had been a change in arrangements. Someone else was flying out from Boston to speak on my behalf. Apologies had been made to the seminar’s organizers.

  Perhaps I was relieved. After all, the paper was a form of professional suicide. So I settled back into the seat and watched the backs of the casinos go by, with an occasional glimpse of the monorail overhead. It looked like we were heading for the airport.

  “Are we going to Nellis?” I asked.

  “Somewhere close by,” Burns replied.

  I remember thinking that they’d better hurry up if this really was an arterial dissection.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked, after we had left the outskirts of the city.

  “Doctor, I’ve told you, one of our staff has sustained a head injury that requires your expertise.”

  “What was he doing?” I asked, surveying the flat desert around us. “Water skiing?”

  At the airport we were rushed through a side door, down a long hallway and into a small office. Above the desk, written in red crayon on the wall, was the phrase “Janet Airlines. Have a nice day.” I showed them my driver’s license, signed a non-disclosure form, and had my photograph taken. I was led through another doorway, which opened onto the tarmac. I asked about my gear and Burns told me it was being brought from the hotel.

  We climbed into a small plane on the edge of the tarmac. It looked like a Gulfstream. It probably took less than ten minutes from our arrival at the airport to lift-off. I was seated between Burns and his companion in an uncomfortable chair in a blackened-out cabin. All that was missing was a briefcase cuffed to my wrist. Nothing felt right.

  “So where are we really going?” I asked as we taxied.

  Burns glanced over me to his companion. “Pete?” he said.