The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 11

A moment to consider memory.

The kalachakra, the ouroborans, those of us who loop perpetually through the same course of historical events, though our lives within may change–in short, the members of the Cronus Club–forget. Some see this forgetting as a gift, a chance to rediscover things which have already been experienced, to retain some wonder at the universe. A sense of déjà vu haunts the oldest members of the Club, who know that they have seen this all before but can’t quite remember when. For others, the imperfect memory of our kin is viewed as proof that we are, for our condition, still human. Our bodies age and experience pain as humans do, and when we die future generations may come and find the place where we are buried and dig up our rotting corpses and say, yes, here indeed is the departed flesh of Harry August, though where his mind has fled to who can say? The implications for reality of this revelation are too numerous to discuss here, but always and again we return to the mind–the mind is what takes the journey through time while the flesh decays. We are no more and no less than minds, and it is human for the mind to be imperfect and to forget. So no one can remember who founded the Cronus Club, though everyone has played their part; perhaps even the ouroboran who made that first choice can no longer remember his part in it and wonders with everyone else. When we die it is as if the world resets, and only memory remains as evidence of the deeds we have done, no more and no less.

I remember everything, and sometimes with that intensity when it is not so much recollection as reliving. Even as I address you now I can recall the sun setting on the hills and the brownish smoke from Phearson’s pipe as he sat on the patio beneath my window, looking towards the untouched croquet lawn. I cannot re-create the exact pattern of my thoughts, in that they had no words, no constructed thing on which to grapple; but I can tell you the moment I reached my decision, where I sat and what I saw. I was sitting on the bed, and I saw a picture of rustic farmhouses painted in greens and greys, with a spaniel barking outside, its legs ungainly and rabbit-like as it bounded in the air.

I said, “Yes, but I have a condition.”

“What would you like?”

“I want to know everything you do about the Cronus Club.”

Phearson only thought for a moment. Then, “OK.”

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 Ceauşescu, 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.