He answered her with silence and a cold stare. Finally, he said, “Thanks.”
And then, just like that, he was all the way back. He smiled warmly, hugged her tightly, kissed her on the lips. He became the person she knew and loved. His eyes lit with a different kind of fire; the kind beating back the night.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re sweating chocolate out your pores. It’s making me think of work. Besides, all I want to devour right now is you.”
***
Cicero took her to Ustica, a little volcanic island off the coast of Palermo.
They rowed their boat to one of the outlying rock formations with a flat top, anchored the boat, and then peered up at the sheer face of the rock.
The fact that the edifice was so clearly insurmountable just spurred them on.
They climbed the rock with nothing to safeguard them, she stepping into the recesses he marked for her by clearly digging his feet into each groove.
Once atop the rock, he spread out a picnic blanket and food from his backpack.
They took in the sights of the coastline, made love, and snacked, made love some more, serenaded by the music of garish seagull squalls. All in plain view of the coastline and countless inhabitants. No one was quite so brazen in those days.
When they weren’t making love, they talked of love. “How blessed I am,” Gertrude said. “Your passion burns in the tiniest of gestures, from how you dust the crumbs off the cloth, to the way you look at the water. How you take in the colors of the sunset, so nuanced, only a painter’s canvas could capture them all. No matter, your love has imprinted every moment on me forever.” She watched the comings and goings along the coastline.
“All these people, all their pain,” she said. “Sometimes I feel the war is the price they pay for our happiness. As if it’s the only way to balance the world.”
He smiled ruefully. An emptiness settled into his eyes, as if, the stopper having been pulled, his spirit was draining out the bottom. “Sometimes I think the price we pay for our happiness is the death of my wife and child.”
“Don’t say such things. You were just as happy then. Even happier. I could see it on their faces, even if I never got a good look at yours.”
“A life so blessed, don’t you think I have an obligation to give something back? To make as much of an impact on the world as it has made on me?” he said.
“You do, one chocolate, one happy face, at a time.”
“That’s not what I mean. I want to change history on a grand scale. I want to make a world full of people like you and me. Who know love as we do. Who know happiness as we do.”
“If it’s immortality you seek, look to the little things, not the big things.”
“How can I seek what I already have?”
“Why so glum?” she said, stroking his face.
“They dropped a bomb on Nagasaki today. They say it wiped out the entire city. I can’t allow such things to exist, not ever again.”
“What can one man do?”
“A lot—if he’s devious and resourceful enough.”
“To act as the world’s guard dog, Cicero… Like Moses, your feet shall never again step on the Promised Land.”
“I know,” he said.
She put a hand to his chest. “When you love, you sound a chord that is heard around the world that resonates until no ill will can cling to anything which lives.”
She brushed the hair from his eyes. “Living small, living humbly, living fully, is greater than a thousand politicians making a million decisions.”
He laughed. “What changes the world is not the poetic sensibility; it’s everyone doing the one thing they were meant to do.”
She fell silent. She realized he had made up his mind, and nothing she would ever say could change that. It was a quality about him she’d swept between the cracks in the floorboards until now, when she could deny it no longer. She loved a man who was demon-possessed. And it went back further than the day he lost his wife and kids. A lot further. Their deaths were just the demon’s way of saying, time to get back on track. She wondered if she would live long enough, if their love would last long enough, for her to understand what drove him.
The first clue of the demon’s presence was in his eyes the day she met him, the way it sparkled when he took hold of her to direct her hand over the chocolates to make the candied markings. He should never have been able to hold another woman in his arms so soon, not even as an act of forgetting. She should have had to force his arms around her so he could grasp the significance for himself; his mind too destroyed to make the most obvious connections.
THIRTY-THREE
Cicero combed the library stacks for books on science, which turned out to be inconveniently stowed in several different sections. When he got all the books back to the table, he pored through them for names and dates.
One hour later, one name in particular stood out. One man had checked out twelve of the thirty-seven titles. The thirty-seven containing high-level, esoteric, “dangerous” knowledge. The hundred or so plus science books of a more elementary nature he choose to ignore. Anyone working at this guy’s level would have committed that stuff to memory long ago.
That left one outstanding problem: To divine from the book titles what the man was after. The fields of science were of a sufficiently discordant nature that no obvious connection jumped out at him.
He would study the books in the order they were read, based on the checkout dates, and hope the “big idea” would jump out at him the way it may have occurred to the reader.
***
Every couple of days, Cicero slid out one of the books he kept in hiding in the chocolate shop, replacing the one just read. He was on the last text. So far, no idea had been forthcoming. There were nights he would awaken with the epiphany for which he’d been hoping. But it would always evaporate before the light of clearer consciousness, once his sleepy logic had worn off.
He considered tracking down the man on faith, but doing that required locking on to some signal. With an idea of what he was up to, he might at least frequent supply stores with the components he needed for whatever he was assembling.
The librarian who might have remembered checking the books out to him, especially considering the peculiar reading habits of Strange Project Man, had died inconveniently before she could impart her memories to him. And his initials, penned beside the imprinted check-out dates, read worse than calligraphy. As to the address card on file, a recent fire had taken care of that.
He’d caught the scent of something big, only to have it evaporate on the wind.
***
“My God. This can’t be.”
Cicero stirred to the sounds of Gertrude talking in her sleep. “What can’t be, my love?”
Gertrude rolled over on her side, turning her back to him. Cicero had all but resigned himself to going back to sleep, when she said, “Moving between timelines, he won’t affect one future, he’ll affect hundreds.” Sweat prickling from her brow, she showed evidence of a fever.
Cicero propped himself up on his elbow. He smiled. “Few people are even more interesting asleep than awake.”
Then the light flicked on in his head. “My avid science reader!”
He leaned into her and asked, “What is his name?”
“Is he truly able?” she gasped.
“What is his name?”
It was no good. Gertrude had fallen asleep again. “Marvelous!” he slammed his back against the mattress. After lighting a cigarette, he said, “Look on the positive side, Cicero. You have an unwitting co-conspirator. That should simplify things immensely.”
A couple hours later he stirred awake, aroused by the insight hitting him. It struck with all the violence and desperation of a drowning man sighting a floating life jacket. “Maybe ‘Able’ is his name. If not, should be easy enough to rule out.”
He sat up and reached for a phone book. “How many Ables can there be?”
***
&n
bsp; Cicero flipped the sign on the door to “Closed.” It was two PM, the best part of the day for selling chocolates, as they literally melted in his customers’ mouths. But the man for whom chocolate-making was the highest of callings died every time he put on his cap and worker’s uniform and rode out the door on his bicycle.
He had become used to being two people. So separate were the personalities that he could undergo torture at the hands of the Nazis and convince the Gestapo he had no idea who Cicero was.
He steered his way toward Able Gantry’s, following an arduous path through the city streets that would easily foil anyone on his trail. Thomas—the name he went by in this guise—had a great sense of spatial relations. No one had yet built a maze that could trap him. He was part sewer rat. As Cicero, he seldom wandered far from home because he was forever getting lost and, when he did, he stuck to tried and true directions, never really exploring off the beaten path. Thomas resented this other part of him, like a weakling brother who demanded his care.
Cicero’s nose for sweet scents was what made him a great chocolatier. He might have made a great florist for the same reason. He might have made a hell of a survivor, able to follow his nose to the plants that could keep him alive in the wild. Thomas, on the other hand, had virtually no olfactory sense. He had to be careful to wash, and soap, and not sweat too profusely, in his eager anticipation to complete his assignments, for fear of alerting the mark he was sneaking up on. Even when a sneak attack wasn’t part of the plan, his prey could well sense something was off about him by his odor. Negative emotions signaled themselves by altering his scent; something of which Cicero was keenly aware. The odors might also linger long enough to put a hound dog of a detective on his trail.
After arriving at Able Gantry’s flat, pressed anonymously against all the others, and rising to three floors above street level, Thomas stole up the back way. He hopped fire escapes, ignoring the glaring eyes of the locals who were so used to thieves in a time of scarcity they were only too happy to ignore him.
He found Able napping in his bed, mid-day, the window on the terrace open to let in fresh air, which would have nothing to do with the apartment. Not even the overhead fan, turning slowly, could coax the stale musty smell to crawl back into whatever hole from which it had escaped.
Thomas thumbed the Bible by the bedside, snorted disapprovingly. Seated on the side of the bed, he caused a depression, which Able sensed as he turned over. “Aisha?” he said, expecting to find her beside him. A girlfriend, perhaps, who he hadn’t seen in a while? Who couldn’t take his obsessing and self-involvement, anymore? Thomas thought, eying the apparatus in the center of the room.
Able relinquished his drowsy state like a man who could not trust his feelings, curled up into a ball before the bed board.
Seeing the gun in Thomas’s lap, he didn’t bother to ask, “Who are you?” He clearly didn’t want to know.
“I read somewhere that the ancient Aramaic was meant to trigger a communion with God simply by thinking and speaking in the language. The vowels and consonants forever locked into relationships that create harmonic resonances in the brain to trigger the altered states of consciousness that make one more receptive to God’s teachings; that open a conduit to the divine. Think about that. How absolutely spectacular! Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, the most ancient languages, in their earliest forms, of course, had a lot of the same magic. Nothing like our crass languages of today.” He set down King James with a scowl.
“But, borrowing from that thinking, haven’t you noticed how superior German is for cranking out the best scientists in the world? Hell, Hitler has working for him people building a space program, rocket ships that can fly to the moon, if you can believe that, a good fifty years ahead of their time. Already, our war machine is second to none. Just engineering, mind you. When it comes to arts, humanities, common sense, we’re an absolute waste. An embarrassment.”
Thomas thumbed the barrel on his gun. “So tell me about your invention.”
Able wrapped his arms around his legs. “I’d rather not.”
“You should be proud. A time machine, right?”
Able’s voice, when it erupted, came from some place much deeper inside him. His lips—like a ventriloquist’s—barely moved. “How did—?”
“I’ve been reading the books you checked out of the library for weeks. It was tough connecting the dots, but after a while, nothing else really fit.”
Thomas handed the kid a cigarette, hoping to calm his nerves. He was trembling, and he’d wet the bed sheets. In the stale air, it must have smelled like hell, but Thomas didn’t register much beyond a mild tickling in his nostrils. “Tell me, what spurred you to come up with this crazy idea?”
The kid smoked the cigarette after Thomas lit it for him; he couldn’t get his hands to work well enough to light it for himself. He calmed a little, just not enough to talk.
Thomas ran his eyes over the room, hoping to fill in his end of the conversation for him until Able could get his mouth working again. “Not much by way of mementos. A stark life, all in all. I guess if I didn’t feel like I belonged in this world, in this time, I might reach out to some other.”
Thomas got off the bed, fondled the items lying about the place, what few of them there were.
He followed a trail of bonsai trees, the latest additions having just had wire added to train the branches. The older specimens had been tortured into far more interesting configurations with far more offshoots. “I get it now,” Thomas said. “You can’t really travel back in time, can you? But you can create another offshoot each time you attempt to go back, like the constantly diverging branches of these older bonsai.
“And you believe—quite interestingly, I must confess—that if you do this enough, you’ll create enough snaking convolutions, enough branching offshoots, to relieve the pressure points in any one time line. Just like you can keep these younger trees with their unruly branches from faling over. You can bleed off the stresses, so that world wars, holocausts, no longer need to occur. Genocides become a thing of the past. That’s the pattern in your reading material I couldn’t glean before. It’s brilliant. Crazy—but brilliant.”
“Why do you say it’s crazy?” Able said, the scientist in him coming to the surface, allowing him to replace his emotions with curiosity.
“Well, think about it. It’s like saying the mind of God is given to strokes and seizures and blood clots. So the role of man, in co-creating life with him, is to build the mind of God better somehow from the ground up.”
“What’s so crazy about that?” Able stretched out. “The Bible talks about man striking a covenant with God. What else could it mean but that heaven on earth can only be built with our willful conscious participation?”
Thomas rubbed his chin. “I like the way you think. Such profundity—the likes of which few philosophers and religious scholars can match—and to find it in a scientist of all people… well, it takes my breath away.
“And it’s easy enough to see how wartime could inspire someone of your caliber to divine how to prevent not just humanity, but history from ever incurring such horrors again.”
“Still, you’re not convinced.” Able started folding in on himself again.
“For what it’s worth, I’m definitely moved. Furthermore, I’m open to the possibility that you may well be right. But, I just can’t take the chance you could be wrong.”
“You understand—no matter how many times I use that time machine—it will never affect anything back in this world.” Able’s eyes did not check his for understanding.
“But that’s the thing; if you follow your reasoning to its logical conclusions, it cannot help but affect this world and this time. I mean, its very purpose is to shockproof the mind of God, to make it impervious to breakdowns of any kind. But, it could do just the reverse. It could just rob the circulation flowing through the Godhead, creating a knot, an entangled mess of timelines, until a stroke is inevitable. I mean, what if God thi
nks in terms of alternate realities to begin with? What if there are already infinitely many timelines and parallel universes? What if there’s a sublime order and symmetry to them, like a flower opening? It makes sense God would grasp this pattern, but it would be quite beyond human comprehension.
“And here you come along, with the best intentions, mind you, and throw a pipe wrench into things. Well, you can see, can’t you, why I just can’t take the risk?”
“What if I’m right? What then?” Able said, shivering.
“Well, then, God will find a way, another scientist, another day perhaps, who’s clever enough to elude me. I can’t stop progress cold in its tracks, as much as I’d like to sometimes.”
Able’s cigarette finished, his pacifier no longer working, he darted for the terrace and jumped, hoping to catch the fire escape across the way. He hit the railing, and the impact made Able look like an exploded piñata struck hard on his birthday. It was his birthday, come to think of it, by some un-noteworthy coincidence.
Thomas turned to face the time machine, temporarily at a loss over what to do with it. How does one incapacitate a time machine, exactly, when its every working principle eludes you? A bomb would do nicely, but bomb-making wasn’t exactly his specialty, either. He made a mental note to learn. If he was going to live forever, he had to figure that post World War II, bomb-making supplies might not be so hard to come by; his current rationale for not bothering.
He looked around for an ax or a sledge-hammer, but Able wasn’t so forthcoming. Alas. He sighed, and flopped down on the ground; he couldn’t put off the revelation any longer. There was just one thing to do, start stripping the machine down to spare parts no one would have a clue what to do with, or even think actually belonged together. There was the concern of someone coming up to the flat, eventually. But suicides were the order of the day. It might be days before the police could even be bothered to respond to a call about someone jumping off his balcony. And a landlord entering, he could handle. He might even ask him for a sledge hammer.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 112
