Dream: Co-conspirator seeks someone willing to make a long-term commitment
Before all this, imagine me in a coffee shop. The morning light streaming in. I overhear a realtor talking to a colleague about her 'other' maternal grandma, the one she didn't know about; the one who died in the 1960s.
I am off to work. Research.
Waking factors in the following dream:
- Introducing someone to If These Walls Could Talk 2
- Dropping by my old (pre-transitional) landlady to find out she'd recently moved.
- See prior entries regarding extents of control
In Southern Europe, in a medical camp, among the nurses.
It's not clear what we're doing here but maybe the politicians are getting ready for a war. How do they know?
In retrospect, this may not be history as you know it. World War 2 hasn't broken out yet. It's safer to insert cross-temporal operatives now. Mymission is to gather data and not interfere. To watch, not act. It's making me twitchy.
Her: Clever. Assertive. Her hair looks so pretty when she curls it like that. The healing is nice, but the job lets her push her mind, to learn and practice as much empirical science as shefeels that a woman can pull off on a job.
Me: well, there are butch women in the auxilliary. And there are young men doing donkey-work. I don't know which they see me as. No-one'sheard of Christine Jorgensen yet, although a few might know of Magnus Hertzfeld in Berlin. Either way, I push a gurney-
-and sidle up next to her. She knows what's going on. She knows I like her. And maybe it's reciprocal. She's game to talk alone. But she's peery.She knows something is up.
Well, I can't say much else in public. Alone then. Behind cotton pull-away bedcurtains that encircle no bed. The conversation is already in flow.
"Where I'm from?"
Fuck it.
"I'm from two thousand twelve. The year."
She's not buying this.
"I'm a time-traveller. They sent me back here from the future. It's a job then. It's what we do."
Incredulous.
Okay. What do I say? Changes in human rights? American politics?
Screw it. I pull out my smartphone. Can't believe they let me travel with it, but we need it for work now and then.
She's curious, but scientifically minded. Impressed by the gagetry, and my wit, but it doesn't prove anything. For all she knows, I'm a spy, or aleak.
Well, I guess I am a leak, but not like that.
Soon, I am recalled elsewhere.
A dry patch of land, near the dead sea. A collapsed tent. It's still 1933. The military again. Infantrymen now. They see me as almost one of them.They know about time-travel, but they are not from the future like I am. They've been tipped off that someone is messing with the past. Is it us?
Again, fuck my orders. I have to warn someone.
"I have to tell you guys, this Israel thing won't really work out. It's a clusterfuck. I don't know if there's... some alternative location? Just trust me onthis."
A large dog, abandoned, confused, desperate, climbs out of the tent and clamps its jaws on my hand. The others pull it off, kill it. I'm awfully chillabou this.
Where are the people? There were people living here. Palestinian and Jewish.
But now it's dead. They're all gone. Dead. Sandy pits where buildings use to lie.
Someone else has been here, tampering with history. Ten, twenty years before us. Why? Did they try to create this boneyard? Or did they try toprevent future suffering? Either way, it didn't work out well.
The commander is unimpressed. Does he know? In his eyes, history must be set aright. I can't win this one.
I do not like this. I can feel sleep growing shallow. can't win that. But I can push the dream a little further.
Recalled back to the present for a few weeks while the company irons out the hitches.
South Burnaby.
I have deep skepticism as to whomever would send people into the past, just to watch. It's eating at me. And sitting on my hands is not what Iwant to do at work.
But I can't change every evil. Someone - some other traveller - tried to do that in Israel/Palestine and now we - or at least my former coworkers -will go "fix" it into the current situation. Ugh. Some other traveller attempted a dramatic, sweeping act of compassion blinkered by hubris.Someone either like me, or inspired by me. And look what happened. Seriously? Is that the universe? Is god smacking us down for kicks?
Can't win fights you can't win. Small changes only. Lives lived. Cooperating. Changes compounded. Subtle, cautious acts. Who knows whatgood we could do if we researched and planned.
Okay then.
I know what I have to do. I go in with a plan.
I come to a house for sale. I looked it up. Her name was on the municipal records.
Two cunning people would work something out given enough time. Right?
A realtor steps outside, catches her breath as a couple make the tour. Am I too late?
Do the math, kid. 89 years. Yeah. Probably
She is in her fifities, stocky, strong, dark tan, the gray blacked out of her hair. She looks familiar.
"Excuse me." I say. "I'm looking for [NAME]. Does she still live here?"
"No" says the realtor turns away, to consider the house and her clients. "She lived here since the sixites, and finally put it up a couple of weeksago. Why do you-"
She turns back. Her eyes pop open.
"Grandma?"
So there is a plan. I don't know how the family dynamics worked. What cover we lived under. What name I went under so that I could not havebeen contacted. How much my future granddaughter knows.
Did I seriously go into the past and live through the thirties, forties, fifties and... the first part of the sixties? Did I not try to change my own life? There must be one hell of a good reason.
Something awesome that I couldn't afford to jeapordize.
Alright.
I am waking now. I hold myself in semi-consciousness. I chase the last chapter.
I am standing in a doorway pulled open by a breeze. It also blows the curtains inside the pallative care room. In a bed, a woman waits, breathes,listens to an audiobook, watches the spectre of sun-on-curtain.
111 years old. Two, three days left.
I can see her. I knock. She's expecting me. She has an envelope.
It will give me the proof she needs;
she will give me the cunning plan I need.
I accept it. Tomorrow I will go to work, and I will see her again - eighty-nine years ago.