They waited for Santini to speak up, to find his way through the silence like a homing pigeon coming home to roost in its birthplace of macabre dreams.
Finally, when they’d all but given up, Santini spoke.
“I was working on a farm in Germany after the war,” he said, “doing what I did every day, turning the soil with the aid of an ox and a hand-held tiller. More flush farms could afford a real tractor. Still, the work was peaceful, and calming after years of explosions going off in my head night and day.
“I had chosen not to fight in the resistance; my parents were too broken down and wouldn’t have survived without me. So I hid in the root cellar, in holes in the ground, wherever I could. My parents got a pass from the Germans because they weren’t Jewish and because they could make the land yield crops, and they gave away the food free to the German war effort. The Germans never knew how much we were holding back because they never believed that lousy patch of dirt could yield so much produce in the first place.
“My parents died quietly before the war was over. I found out the price I would pay for the last few years with them years later when I was tilling the soil, much as my family had done for generations. And I unearthed a mass grave of bodies; roughly six hundred in all. The Nazis had used the remote region of the property for one of their killing fields.
“I spent the rest of my life returning each body to their families, the ones we could identify. Maybe half of them never found their way back home. So that was my contribution to the war effort, never knowing how many of those people I could have saved for putting my own family first.
“And why my farm? The occupation had pushed Hitler back past that perimeter months earlier. Those people should never have ended up there. It made no sense.
“Unless, of course, traumatizing me with sufficient pain to bridge several lifetimes was the point. Leaving me no choice but to play time traveler in my mind.”
Silence.
“So that’s it, then,” Gretchen said finally. “That’s the purpose of this life: to combat the many ways life can show itself to be so arbitrary and meaningless; to restore order and meaning and purpose to our worlds.”
“That’s a hopeless task,” Mort said, and swilled his beer.
“Maybe,” Gretchen said pensively. “But when the randomness of our lives took on such epic proportions, it was almost as if a supernatural force hidden behind that seeming randomness rose up to squish us the instant we struggled to find the humanity in ourselves. It’s as if humanity was never meant to suffice. Not for us.
“Finding the gods within us and summoning them to the surface was what was being asked of us all along, which alone could battle such an unconquerable villain.
“Maybe we came back to this point in history because now, more so than at any other age, that is exactly the drama being played out. And not just for us, but for everyone. Maybe God’s angels of war, spread throughout the heavens, on any number of planets that harbor sentient life, have all been undergoing similar preparations for today, for the day when they’d be reborn and tasked with the impossible: of making heaven on Earth.
“Maybe it’s an era that only comes around every thirty thousand years or so, after a complete turn of the wheel of the Zodiac, if astrology is right. And for the briefest of times we can see what we truly are: gods, not men; capable of virtually anything, the second we start believing in ourselves.”
After a prolonged silence, Mort said, “You’re touched, all right.”
“That was lovely, Gretchen,” Santini said. “I don’t know how much of it is true, but I know I’d like to make it true. Maybe this quest we’re on isn’t all about finding and holding on to the truth in a world full of liars who want to pull the wool over our eyes. Maybe loving ourselves means knowing when to lie to ourselves, too, because the lies serve us better than the truth.”
The light went on in Gretchen’s head. “Maybe we need to do that with our pasts. Maybe we need to remember them differently in order to heal, to cure the fears of impotence. Maybe that’s the only way we can restore ourselves enough to face what’s ahead of us in this time. Maybe if we don’t do that, we’re running at sixty-or-seventy-percent capacity, and just won’t have what it takes otherwise.”
“I know one thing, Sister Gretchen,” Mort said. “If I keep tossing and turning with more flashbacks like the ones we’ve been sharing, I’ll be doing just that to quiet my mind. We’ll see how much my batteries are recharged come morning. I’m happy to put your theory to the test in the interest of open-mindedness.”
“Hell of a thing,” Santini said, eying the two scientists still going at it strong. “They’re building a time machine, but we have to manage time travel on our own in order to survive another day.”
“They call it narrative-remembering,” Gretchen said. “Creating new myths to live by when the old ones aren’t empowering enough. It’s all the rage in psychology and literature.”
“You should have been a scholar,” Santini said, over Mort’s snoring.
“I wanted to make my life in the real world, not finding new ways to get lost inside my head.”
“I’m glad you chose the life you did.” Santini squeezed her hand.
***
Mort tossed and turned that night, their conversation stirring the pot of past-life memories until he couldn’t get the sludge to settle, not without conscious effort, which he presumed, in retrospect, was Sister Gretchen’s plan. Fuming, he found he had no choice but to play along, resculpting and remolding memories like Michelangelo reworking the roof of his outhouse.
***
At six in the morning, the quarter master blew his bosen’s pipe through the loudspeaker system to wake the ship’s crew. After which he shouted “Wakie-wakie-wakie!” Mort, familiar with the ritual, cringed.
Next came the loud music for about five minutes, before giving them the orders of the day.
Mort and the rest of the fellas jumped from their hammocks, tied them up as required, with their blankets inside. They had to make sure they were folded in the right way, as in case of an emergency, they were also their life support at sea. They had no life jackets.
Weather was permitting, so they could go up on the flight deck or in the hangars, for some physical training, the quarter-master informed them.
A half hour of calisthenics, then it was down to the showers, and back to the mess to eat and then off to get dressed for the day.
Searching for Willie, who, above all else, loved to eat, Mort passed the cook stirring a large pot of soup with a life boat paddle. That’s a lot of soup, he thought. Since there were no lifeboats aboard, Mort figured the paddle had found a higher destiny. There was no Willie to be found in the cafeteria mess.6
As he breezed by, Mort nodded to the mechanics, and “plane pushers,” and the fellows working in the hangars placing and securing the aircrafts to the deck with cables. Life on an aircraft carrier was never done and always highly dangerous. He wondered if he’d find Willie here, and if he’d find him alive. You had to have the reflexes of an alley cat to know when to duck. It was probably just easier to dodge bullets on land, and safer too; he should have gone Army.
He gave up on the search for Willie. Five-thousand people packed in tighter than wasps in a hive, and the man made the best use of it to stay invisible. No one he asked had seen him, not for months.
That night, entering the waters of Bermuda, they fished the barracuda using their semaphore lights to get them to come near the ship. They also tied hooks at the end of a strong string with meat and threw them in the air to catch sea birds. Willie finally caught up with him, as he usually did, having the time of his life. Maybe that’s why they got along so well; they had a knack for finding one another for the good times. Maybe that was why Mort could never find Willie the rest of the time, come to think of it; probably hung over somewhere, sleeping it off, or barfing his guts out. The man had a weak constitution for anything surpassing a gallon of rum, poor fella.
&nbs
p; As Navy regulations dictated that they could not eat the same food twice, the next morning all the rest was thrown overboard to feed the fish and the birds travelling with them. Once again, he could find neither hide nor hair of Willie. Even after checking all his favorite haunts.
Mort relished Bermuda because this was where he and the boys had the most fun, like large barbecues on the beach, and the visits in the crystal caves where they could see the stalagmites and stalactites. After partaking of both, that night, under the full moon, at Devil’s Hole they played with octopi. Willie was there for all of it, materializing suddenly out of nowhere, responding to the usual “Where the hell have you been?” with the usual “I can’t seem to recall.” Mort always laughed it off, figuring he was referring to his recovery from the night before.
The night, before they were officially at war, sailing towards Europe, Mort found Willie getting his wanker worked over by another sailor.
Apparently, Willie never stopped having good times, and never bothered to pass out drunk; he simply changed venues. Blind drunk, he could hide his homosexuality from himself as much from the rest of the crew. Mort felt bad for him, figuring he had to hate himself a whole lot to play the game of life like that.
Mort found the thought of Willie’s homosexuality easier to deal with realizing he approached it the way he did his drinking, as a form of sexoholism. So they didn’t share one drug of choice in common; a small matter between friends.
All the same, Mort never let go of feeling betrayed, feeling left out of a part of Willie’s life, he couldn’t share with him, and it was the job of best mates to share everything. He started seeing Willie through the same eyes in which he saw himself. He couldn’t help himself.
Every Wednesday afternoon (this being Wednesday, the day after Mort found Willie with Wanker Sucker), it was “make and mend day,” when they washed and pressed their clothes. They had no washing-machines or dryers. So they built one in each mess.
It went like this: They took a big can of milk, and washed it clean. They made a hole in the cover in order to insert a new toilet plunger through it and filled it with water and green soap, put in their dirty clothes, and the cover over the plunger and shook the plunger up and down the can. Voila, a real washing machine.
Mort walked in on Willie working the plunger up and down on his milk can. “Is that what it feels like to get your ass reamed out?” he said. “Make you feel all clean inside?” Mort regretted speaking out of turn in that moment—and for the rest of his life. It was only then he had become conscious of his stowed anger; it leapt out of him like a wrathful tiger.
The way Willie looked at him, Mort knew things were changed forever between them. The carefree frivolity would never be there again. In its place would be this tense, undigested nervousness, like teens on a first date. Prolonged silences, words stuck in their craw; all the awkward stuff of life that it was the entire purpose of boozing and partying heavily to wash away.
For weeks afterwards, Mort would always find his way to the secret parlors aboard ship, the little out of the way places men like him went to party. And Willie, who before would always be there, was there no more. He used that knack for making himself invisible to find other watering holes where he wouldn’t run into Mort and what he thought were his judging eyes. Where he could be himself again, free for a time from the curse.
Until one day, above deck, he was still in character as the jovial bon vivant with his new friend. So much so that when he bumped into Mort he didn’t have time switch gears and become all tense and awkward again. So he continued with his joking, including Mort for the first time in a long while.
“We just cocooned Honekut in plastic. He woke to find six of the guys sliding him into a gun turret, and, just as the full horror is sinking in, someone shouting, ‘Fire in the hole!’” Mort and Willie and his new friend laughed their asses off and for a brief second it was like old times again. “Hey, this is the one I was telling you about,” Willie said, “keeps waiting for Rita Hayworth to step off that poster, stretch out her legs, and step into his arms.” The three reprised their laughter.
And then Willie was gone, sliced in half by a broken cable.
Mort rewound the film in his head, intent to sneak in a few scenes that he had never gotten a chance to before.
This time, Mort found Willie getting his knob polished, he stayed, handed him a cigarette, as joy boy detached himself from Willie’s wanker and made off into the darkness. “Did I ever tell you about my younger brother?” Mort said. Willie was shivering from the cold, probably thinking there was a hundred places he’d rather be right now, and that whatever was coming down the pike, it couldn’t be good. “I missed his growing up, as did dear old dad, who made off with another woman, a harlot who gave him syphilis, which he never treated. The day came when his brain rotted out of his head. By then, it was little more than a swimming pool for those syphilis bacteria, like spaghetti under a microscope, I’m told.
“Anyway, this story isn’t about him; it’s about my brother. He was like you. I missed out on his life because, rather than give me a chance, he just ran off one day. If we’d spoken, he’d have realized I really didn’t give a shit, and both our lives would have been a lot richer.”
Willie relaxed once he got the point of the story. And he stopped shivering. Stopped cold.
Mort decided he liked this game. By staying lucid in his dreams, he could better control his fate, reshaping the past in tribute to loved ones lost. Maybe history was imperfect, but maybe, in God’s memory, the real timeline assembled itself from the patchwork quilt of edited revisions. It seemed like a great way to honor the ones he loved, but also to reclaim a part of himself that had been lost back then.
Santini was right; he felt like Humpty Dumpty putting himself back together.
Sister Gretchen was right; once he was all assembled again, he’d have the presence of mind to fight off whatever tomorrow threw at him back in his world, in his current life. Maybe in another place and time, men could have functioned without having to gather themselves up like this. But one shot in the arm from Willie was all he needed to convince him that the coping skills for dealing with today came from being here now, fully, completely, so present to the moment he had all the resources and reserves he needed to weather any storm. That, after all, was what he couldn’t give Willie, that presence of mind. That was why things had gone horribly wrong the first time. And the instant he could be more here and now for him—shazam.
He settled in for a new nightly practice that would redefine him, that would supercharge him. That would reclaim his energy from the past so he had more for the here and now. Soon he would no longer be Clark Kent; he’d be Superman.
He went back into the past once again to fix it.
***
After throwing the plunger aside and taking the clothes out of the milk can, Charlie gave the pants and shirt a good rinse. Then he hung up the clothes near the hot boilers to dry. He could feel the rumble of the aircraft-carrier’s engines beneath his feet. All that was left to do was to press the clothes and look sharp and proud.
A few hours later, he was doing just that when Mort walked in on him. “You came to fight a war, or iron your clothes?” Mort said.
“You never figured out why the military spends so much time emphasizing order, did you? Pushing rules and regulations… Oh shit.” Charlie noticed the misplaced socks left on the bunk and nearly had a heart attack. The smallest thing left out could clog up the pipes, socks especially, taking a ship out of commission just when it was needed most, in the middle of a fight. Charlie stowed the socks in their proper container. Feeling calmer now, he returned to lecturing Mort. “Well, the answer is very simple. In the chaos of war, we have to have some way of holding ourselves together, of marshaling our emotions, of not coming undone. Order, my friend, is tantamount to sanity under pressure.”
Mort laughed. “I say staying soused is an even better way to numb the pain. A lot easier on your free time, too.�
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He flopped down on the bed and fired up a cigarette. Charlie aimed the fan at Mort to blow the smoke out into the hall. “I didn’t spend all morning ironing this uniform so you could stink it up with smoke.”
“Aren’t we the pair?”
“So long as you remain totally and utterly irresponsible, it’s my duty to do the worrying for both of us.”
Mort reprised his laughter. “I suppose some part of me agrees with you, or I’d never put up with your insanity.”
Charlie looked up from his ironing to find Mort’s face stuck in the same position as the last time he looked. “Why are you staring at me like that? Like you know something I don’t. You hear some rumors about me being reassigned to Captain of the Heads?” Captain of the Heads was their title for the guy assigned to scrub out the shitters.
Mort flicked the cigarette butt into the fan, watched it get spit out into the hall. Then he straightened himself up, adjusted his cap, and excused himself, smiling on his way out. He glanced back at Charlie, noticed the dour look on his face he’d branded him with with his parting remarks. Charlie gave him a “screw you” look and went back to his ironing.
That evening, per the usual, some of the men played cards. Others built model ships or planes, made photo albums, or pressed clothes, shined boots and shoes with a spit shine…or went to the barber shop, the canteen, or other messes to meet and chat with friends of other departments. As they had a radio station they could also listen to all kinds of music, even classical. The evenings were nice as a whole, especially when they were reading and writing letters to their girlfriends at home. Charlie stepped through the rogue gallery calmed by the evening rituals in progress, as predictable as the ridges in his pressed uniform.
A couple of the boys were already at the hooch. The stuff was so strong that if one of them fell overboard, he would drink a “tot” and his clothes would dry instantly. They purchased the rum in small wooden barrels in Kingston each year when in the vicinity of Jamaica. Also like clockwork. Charlie was starting to realize he could no longer function outside of the Navy’s strict structures, its routines and regularity.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 108
