Army of the Brave and Accidental

by Alex Boyd

  Checking on him—for he was designed to be traceable—I saw that he materialized in the morning light of a clear blue sky above Chicago, descending like a superhero next to a brown building with the lattice of a black fire escape down one corner. He walked a few blocks under the elevated subway trains that slip between buildings. Ignoring any startled looks he may have received, he went striding to an intersection on South Michigan Avenue where a plastic and metal canopy over a subway entrance partially blocked drivers’ views.

  “This is where my heart was closed for business,” he said to the air as though a camera was present. He knew I’d be listening. And then his earlier self and his family approached the street corner he stood on, startled and slowed by his presence there, his suit still swimming with images meaningful to him. He went down on both knees as though to make himself into a small roadblock of some kind. He looked at his younger daughter, tried to meet her eyes and held out a hand flat in a motion that said, Stop. In clumsily pulling him from history, I’d not looked closely enough at him; I had not seen he was a wounded man.

  Herman hadn’t done much, but slowing down his family was enough as a car peeled and flashed around the corner where his youngest daughter had been standing before. Perhaps she had gone running ahead excitedly—I confirmed the data even as it melted away and was gone, and could hardly blame him for wanting to correct a world where a child’s teeth can be scattered like dice. As he and his family began to find the right words to ask a question, he took a moment to smile and look at them all. He raised himself to his feet, turned away from them and looked up into the air to say, “I am available to you.” He was mine again. He’d saved his family, and he was mine again.

  33: Herman

  “Be happy,” was the only trite thing I could think of to say, despite a swelling of emotion upon seeing my family again. I could move somewhere as soon as I think of it, but crawled through language as though through brambles. If I needed to speak it was necessary to think first, and I turned away from my family and even from myself, rather than explain. I said, “I am available to you.” I said it into the air and then walked around the corner to vanish to another part of the city. As for my former self, I think he’d have understood there was just too much to explain, which is what I believe they call an understatement.

  What I understand now is time. I see different kinds of events, linked and growing together as different species of plants and animals do. It’s possible to see if you can only read the signs. While a dendrologist can walk through the woods, notice a sick birch tree and decide to leave the woods, I could not step outside time any more than anyone else.

  Athena had given me a great gift. I could go anywhere I wanted to go and she trusted me to honour her request to find Oliver. At first, I foolishly took myself to Toronto, his home, and looked around at the clear blue to be found between downtown skyscrapers. It made little sense to go somewhere he’d already left, but some part of me wanted both my freedom and a half-hearted gesture toward the goal she’d given me. I walked for hours. It was possible for me to see a great deal, and watching a few people put a couch at the side of the road, I was tempted to tell them it was the wrong time to do it. Watching someone walk down the street, alone and huddled into themselves, I knew it was a failing romance, quieter than a paddle in water. I stopped to look around frequently, searching for small rewards.

  I followed a woman in her early twenties into a bookstore. She browsed her way through the store, spoke to an employee, her body a polite arrow turned away from me. The books, colourful and arranged across a few tables, also caught my attention but I think she began to sense me, and hating to make anyone uncomfortable, I forced myself to go out the door and onto the street. I’d forgotten my frame was a middle-aged one. It’s easy to forget something like that.

  The crowd swept me along and I followed the river of bodies down the steps of a subway entrance. This was a mistake for me as I hated crowds and I hated to be underground, lost underneath everything, hidden in the world’s engine. I took a random subway train and thought I could see a man displaced in time, clinging to a subway pole. He seemed to sway to his own, different rhythm. The situation was intolerable and I took myself far away, appearing in the upper atmosphere and into a wind-whipping fall before I brought myself to the surface below me, this time in Greece.

  It was a busy town square and I sat on the edge of the fountain. In the distance, I saw a girl walking diagonally across the square toward me. Small and frail, she stood out. Her shoulders were sharp squares, her legs delicate and thin in white stockings. She had long, stringy black hair hanging down the back of her pink dress. Despite her youth, she walked with poise and dignity such as I’d never seen before. She glided through the heat and yellow dust of the square. As she came closer to me, I realized she wasn’t a little girl at all, but a very elderly woman. She had a story in every line of her over-painted face. I wondered if she was Death or just another person displaced in time, but eventually concluded she was someone bearing the weight of a lifetime on those little, square shoulders. I felt anxious as her path took her past me without so much as a glance my way.

  I knew I should be thinking about Oliver and recalled the data Athena had given me. I dragged a few of my fingers through the water in the fountain and looked up again to catch a last glimpse of the old woman as she turned a corner. Vaguely I thought of Oliver and then his elderly relatives. If you cannot find a person, begin by finding a way to the person. I saw an old Scottish woman who had come to Canada at around age nineteen, and then I saw her as a girl in Arbroath with her twin sister. They were sitting on a low, stone wall around a white house by a patch of woods, keeping still in the hope of seeing rabbits. The girl would become his grandmother. I had found a thread. I stood to leave and turn my attention to Scotland.

  34: Calandra

  I’m not sure why he caught my attention. He stood on the street corner looking around, tall and calm as a pelican. The mildly alarming thing was that he turned to look at me as though I was the thing he was looking for. The ground seemed to shift as he walked. For a tall man with sharp features, he moved more gracefully than he should have and crossed the street through slowing cars and the sound of horns as if oblivious to them. To my surprise, his sharp features melted into a warm smile that didn’t linger long on his face before he stopped in front of me.

  “It’s time to set him free,” he said simply, though of course there was nothing simple about what this meant. I was rattled and took a step back. He gave me his name, “Herman,” and smiled again, but how did he know about Oliver? I turned to go, saying, “He is freely living with me,” over my shoulder though I immediately sensed it was a mistake to have responded at all.

  When I later saw Oliver, I asked, “How was today? Did you find anything?” and winced a little inwardly at having not paused between the two questions. I’d found work as a nurse that usually kept me late, but Oliver was between jobs, and I knew he didn’t feel good about it. “No, afraid not,” he answered.

  Oliver had paused a Western with Jimmy Stewart, and I knew he wanted to turn it on again. We spent an uneasy evening together and I wasn’t sure how to approach him about Herman. I thought perhaps Herman would just go away. We made dinner in our little, white kitchen and watched the rest of the Western as though a man interested to introduce a personal earthquake into our lives was not lingering around somewhere just out of sight. It was The Naked Spur, among the few Westerns ever nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay. As a final film to watch together, not bad.

  I found it difficult to hate Herman, despite what he represented, probably because of the way he smiled without arrogance. I heard someone once say that hatred is a failure of the imagination, a failure to be able to imagine yourself in someone else’s place.

  But there was little compensation for the thought of losing Oliver and not even knowing how to approach him about it. Our apartment and ou
r slowly growing collection of things did hum a little more loudly now that I knew it might not last much longer, and so I paid more attention to it, drifting a hand across the spines of the two shelves of books we’d collected so far. Tired, I pressed the same few fingers to my forehead and felt the thin layer of warmth and smoothness that covered my skull. Oliver asked me if something was wrong but I smiled and told him, “No.” That night I dreamed again of the jellyfish person lodged in me, able to signal how many more times something could happen. He seemed louder this time, quivering, matching my beating heart, and I woke up in a sweat.

  At least it wasn’t a gradual loss, but a particularly vivid day brought on by a man in a suit that, now that I think about it, swam with images of people who must’ve been important to him. I didn’t know for sure where he was from but he sounded American. Who needs a passport when your body lives and breathes whatever is important to you?

  “A pleasant day to you,” Herman said as he passed us, and he kept on down the street. I later caught sight of him crossing the street and a few days later in our favourite place for chips with curry sauce. He was there having a meal in a booth. I noticed the images on his suit had slowed to almost a crawl so that you might only notice that by the time he left, his clothing looked quite different. He didn’t look at us and Oliver didn’t notice him, but it brought home the inevitability of telling Oliver.

  “I think we should have a conversation with that man,” I said impulsively and Oliver turned to look at him. There was a pause and to my surprise Oliver said, “We’ve met.” Looking up as though he sensed we were ready, Herman smiled and gestured to the seats opposite him in the booth.

  “Athena,” he explained, “has found a way for Oliver to live more safely.” He spoke without any preamble, and carefully as though he’d practised it. “As it is, Waters engages in casual searches but he’ll find you someday. Athena will bring you to the future you lost where Waters will not look for you. And she can disguise the possibility.”

  Back with Penelope they’d be shielded by a mountain peak of old time over them, showing they weren’t together. Everybody had this, of course, but usually it was behind them or ahead of them. After all, even if they stayed together as a couple, people die. Athena said Oliver and Penelope could have whatever amount of time they’d have together and she’d pattern it to look otherwise.

  And that was how it ended. Oliver and I had been given a year together and now it was over. I saw my country again and made it his country, at least for a time. We had a first step and with only a small amount of imagination we could see a future together. But nothing is forever. Some things only establish themselves and then leave. In return it can be said we appreciated them all the more. Oliver came to me as dazed as a shipwrecked sailor and I gave him back to the sea.

  35: Oliver

  I trusted Athena and her mechanical man. It wasn’t completely surprising to see him. I’d started to feel something was coming to interrupt our lives, the way a part of you instinctively feels the rain coming on or the light beginning to go. The man’s eyebrows worked like a set of dark caterpillars as he explained, “Athena can place you in frozen time, alive, in a cemetery to wait out the long years. You’ll sleep through it untouched.”

  I considered it for a few minutes and admitted, “I guess I like the idea of being alive in the middle of a cemetery, like one flower emerging through a crack in a paved road.” Our hard, plastic booth had a large window facing the street. I was able to see an old man stopped outside standing more or less next to us and peering into the window for a long moment, though a glance told me he was only trying to see the menu of fish, chips and pies, and perhaps to see what was scattered below under an orange heat lamp.

  Herman looked startled and captivated by the old man’s thin face. His eyes were widened slightly in a very human expression of mild alarm. Maybe there was more to the mechanical man. I don’t know that it was a conscious decision he made, but the still images on his jacket and vest shifted away and were replaced with Penelope, who seemed to be looking at me. It was my turn to look mildly shocked. I believe Calandra saw it too, and we both knew I couldn’t resist returning to the family that rested quietly in my thoughts. Herman brought his attention back to us again and the images changed, turning back to a set of people I assumed to be his family.

  “Let’s go,” Calandra said quietly. He had explained everything while we sat in silence, an increasingly heavy feeling settling over us. I went home with Calandra in that silence, and we went up the stone steps to our apartment painfully aware it might be for the last time. I don’t think there’s anything harder than going through a last time for everything: a last sleep together in our wide bed, her breathing next to me; a last morning and breakfast. I looked up the information about trains to Arbroath. We had been told this could be done anywhere but I felt a certain connection to Arbroath. I imagined a more charged atmosphere there for me. It was the place where my personal history pooled and collected, and the only place to go and do this.

  We were quiet on the train. Looking out the window the sun kept flashing over the hills and stabbing at my eyes. I finally pulled the blind and asked Calandra, “What will you do next?” I tried to sound pleasant.

  “Return to Glasgow, I guess,” she said, “It would be nice to connect with family again, particularly my nephews.” She seemed tired and sad, and it occurred to me she hadn’t slept well, while I slept like the dead, as always. I cracked a joke about this but she took it seriously, saying, “There’s nothing wrong with being rested when you go to meet your fate. I’m actually a little envious.” And with a tight smile on her face she folded her hands together and stared ahead down the aisle of the train.

  In the cemetery we knew to look for three angels on an impressive stone base and pry open a tightly fitted but ultimately loose panel at the back. I’d crawl in to find a pocket of still time, or so I’d been told. We held each other but it was an immensely hard thing to say farewell, and I don’t think either one of us could’ve endured a long goodbye. There were one or two tears on her face when I stepped back, and she was smiling the same tight, weathered smile. Unable to think of anything to say, I bent to crawl into the space. Placing my hands carefully on the soft mud, I heard her say, “I never expected you’d crawl your way into time travel like you’re back on the playground.” I laughed, loudly enough that I’m sure she heard. Maybe she was already turning to leave and maybe she wasn’t. Inside, I saw the entire stone base was hollow and there was room to sit with my legs crossed. I held still. I was conscious it was a dark, tight space with a heavy smell of earth as I lifted the panel back into place. I was sure I’d disturbed some leaves when crawling inside. Not knowing what to wait for, I tried to breathe deeply to remain calm and still, but like falling asleep, I was gone before I knew it.

  36: Tomas

  As your plane lands and you wait through the discomfort of changes in air pressure, you don’t suddenly decide to share that you’re going to revive your father with the middle-aged woman next to you—possibly by digging him from a tomb if your information is correct—so you can finally get to know him. In any case, the woman spent most of the flight sighing and rattling her large frame in the small amount of space available to her and occasionally mumbling, “Never again.” When she asked if I’d slept I thought for a moment she felt genuine concern, but it was a set-up for the complaint, “I wish I could.” I suppose I could have said, “At the age of twenty I’ll finally meet the father I don’t know,” but it would only have meant more questions and I preferred to hang onto what silence I could gather.

  I took a train to Arbroath and a cab to the cemetery, tempted to hang my head out the window like a dog to avoid the unfolding smoke of the driver’s cigarette. Grateful to be free of the cab, I stood in the sunlight a moment before casually searching around tombstones and tufts of yellowed, overgrown grass to find my future. I knew to look for three angels on a larg
e, stone base. After ten minutes I found it and it was a simple matter to examine a panel on the back away from the path and pry it loose, finding it to be neatly fitted but not otherwise secured.

  The sunlight spilled into the opening. My father sat there, one crisp leaf like a little tiger claw suspended just above the ground, very close to his foot. He was unnaturally still, like a life-sized photo of the man I never got to know, the stillborn father. I reached for him and he began. It was as simple as releasing a pendulum to allow it to swing once more. It’s an unconscious, automatic part of the senses that confirms someone is breathing and has a heartbeat. Trying to use it purposefully was like employing a weak muscle but I could tell he was alive as I took him by the shoulders and pulled him free. He lay upside down to me, squinting and blinking at me in the sun.

  “That was fast,” he said, and I recognized no time at all had passed for him. I liked him for his calm. As he slowly stood and dusted himself off, he arrived at a statement, obvious but warmly put: “It’s you.” I’d expected him to be groggy or tired the way I’d been by the end of my flight, but there was none of that, and of course it had been the wrong instinct to expect it in the first place. “It’s Tomas,” I said, and he smiled a slow, full smile and embraced me, which is the kind of moment that takes any possible resentment away as surely as a strong wind takes a hat.

  Before we could speak again, we felt something indescribable stir around us. I can only say we felt our bodies become alert as though the earth shifted when nothing had moved. Later we’d determine that lying frozen through so many years would displace a certain amount of time, as though his body had been a stick in a river. We saw flashes of movement, mourners who moved in a flurry of black clothing across the landscape like a murder of crows, a dark blur of activity with small, bright smears of flowers. We were bumped aside by anguish, and brushed in different directions by other events, now rushing through the terrain. One black hearse after another fast-forwarded to a halt and ejected a coffin like a torpedo. Thin cyclists followed the same road and dashed along the billowing stream of mourners like pilot fish.