So began my first–and nearly only–tampering with the course of temporal events. I began generally, broad strokes. Phearson was delighted to hear about the fall of the Soviet Union, but his delight was tempered with suspicion, in the manner of a man who couldn’t quite believe that I wasn’t inventing platitudes to appease his aspirations. He demanded details–details–and as I told him of perestroika and glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the opening of Austria’s borders, the death of Ceau?escu, he continually handed notes to his assistants to check the names I named, to see if there really was a Gorbachev in the Kremlin and to assess if he really could be such a powerful ally in the destruction of his own nation’s glory.
His interests weren’t purely political. Science and economics were his mid-afternoon distractions, presented as light entertainment between the serious political interrogations. My interests did not aid him. I knew that the mobile phone was coming and that a mysterious force called the Internet was gathering strength but couldn’t tell him how or who had invented it as such things had never been of any great interest to me. Domestic politics held almost no interest for him, but his questions adapted to the answers I gave, growing more specific even as I strove to keep it as general as I could. After his initial doubts that the future could indeed be so rosy, he began to embrace the finer details, pressing ever closer for newspaper headlines half-seen on a tabloid board, or recollections of a journey on a train from Kyoto in 1981.
“My God, sir,” he exclaimed. “You are either the world’s greatest liar or you have one hell of a memory.”
“My memory,” I replied, “is perfect. I remember everything from when I first had the consciousness to understand that this was recollection. I cannot remember being born; perhaps the brain is simply not developed enough to understand the event. But I remember dying. I remember the moment when it stops.”
“What’s it like?” asked Phearson, eyes gleaming with a personal enthusiasm I hadn’t yet seen in his work.
“The stopping is fine. Nothing. A stop. The getting there is difficult.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing more or less than the natural function of a decaying mind.”
“Maybe it doesn’t count for you.”
“ ‘Doesn’t count’? You think that my death isn’t…” I checked myself, looked away. “I suppose I haven’t got anything to compare it with, have I?” I didn’t add that neither had he.
I told no lies but couldn’t quite satisfy him.
“But how does the invasion of Afghanistan happen? There’s no one there to fight!”
His ignorance of the past was almost as profound as his ignorance of the future but at least had the advantage of being independently corroborated. I told him to study the Great Game, to research the Pashtun, look at a map. I could give him dates and places, I explained, but the understanding–that’d have to be his own.
And in my spare time I studied. Phearson was, it seemed, as good as his word. I read about the Cronus Club.
There was very little indeed. If it hadn’t tallied so closely with my experience, I would have considered the entire thing a hoax. A reference to a society in Athens in AD 56, renowned for their learned discourse and exclusivity, the mystery surrounding their nature leading to their expulsion four years later, which, the recorder noted, they took with remarkable good grace and careless ease, unbothered by the events of the time. A diarist noting two years before the sack of Rome that a building on the corner of his street dedicated to the cult of Cronus had emptied, the very finely dressed ladies and gentlemen who went there moving on with a warning that soon things would not be worth their staying, and lo, the barbarians came. In India a man accused of murder denying the crime and slitting his own throat in his cell, saying before he died that it was a tedious shame but that like the snake he would swallow his own tail and be born again. A group renowned for their secretive ways leaving Nanjing in 1935 and one, a lady known for her wealth–no one knew how she had acquired it–warning her favourite maid to leave the city and remove her family far afield, giving her coin to do it and prophesying a war in which everything would burn. Some called them prophets; the more superstitious named them demons. Whatever the truth, wherever they went, the Cronus Club seemed to have a twin knack for avoiding trouble and staying out of sight.
In a sense, Phearson’s file on the Cronus Club was his own undoing. For, reading it, for the very first time I began to consider the question of time.
Chapter 12
I have already mentioned some of the stages which we go through when attempting to understand what we are. In my second life I, in a rather clichéd display, killed myself to make it cease, and in my third life I sought an answer from God.