Fragments of Me. Eric G. Swedin
car. Most curious, and most ominous. How was the enemy manipulating the authorities to continue the chase for me? What purpose did it serve to look for James Barash when that body is so easy to find? Are they searching for Joanna, a missing patient? This will take some time to mull over.
Sneaking out the cabin door, I carefully scan the surrounding woods. It is clear. A quick twist turns the gas on.
An hour later I lie in the tub, drawing comfort from the water. All night, I doze fitfully, waking only when the water loses its warmth and I have to replenish the supply.
My brain chemistry summons dreams to rationalize my neurons into harmony. Nightmarish images flash back and forth, finding some material in Joanna’s memories. A new baby brother whom everyone fawns over. A well-loved doll lost. Her father in uncontrollable fury. Sniffing an industrial inhalant that her friend brought over.
New material is found in my own memories, images of time past and places distant. A young boy breaks through the ice. His sobbing cry for help is lost as the air rushes from his shocked lungs. As he flounders, the chill leaks through his thick coat.
I gasp awake, tears running down my face. The water is too cold for a summer morning just before dawn. Crawling from the tub, I pull a towel from a musty drawer. After drying myself, still shivering, I ransack the bedroom for some clothes that might fit me. A pair of sweat pants and an oversized tee shirt. Two layers of socks and a pullover sweater complete my attire.
Enough light is coming in the windows now so that I can move about the kitchen. I quickly boil some water to make tea and oatmeal. My eating is not so awkward as yesterday, though my right side is very stiff.
After rinsing the dishes, I return to the living room. A skylight casts a yellow square on the floor. Pulling over a rocking chair, I settle down and lean back. The sun is refreshing, cleansing, as if I am absorbing vitamins by osmosis. I rock back and forth ever so slightly. No thoughts interrupt my worship.
Finally the warmth becomes too uncomfortable and I shrug out of the sweater. Ah, much nicer. Calm thoughts come.
Introspection is not a skill that a person easily acquires. It requires a degree of unflinching moral courage that so many lack. Looking into the self and acknowledging the cruel impulses, the selfish motivations, or something even worse, is incredibly difficult. Even I struggle with this skill.
Now is the time to assert my rationality and regain dominance over chemistry. I am more than chemicals. While I think with Joanna’s brain, my core self is beyond her. My thoughts are expressed through her neurons, but do not originate there. What to do about my situation? I am safe for the moment but the enemy will surely track me with every effort for as long as it takes to kill me. Why? Does it hate me because I am like it? Two of a kind with no other peers.
Does it think that I am a threat to it? An intriguing possibility. Certainly, in the past, I have come across evil people and judged them and slain them. My nature makes such a moral choice easy to implement. This is a new situation. Can I even kill the enemy? Possibly. Knowing its dark nature, my immediate inclination is to destroy it. But what if it kills me instead? It has been centuries since I have almost died, and then it was due to my own lack of caution more than anything else. Unlike true humans, I have rarely been forced to confront my mortal nature.
How evil is this creature? In our one touch I found such spite and hatred. And fear. Was its reaction merely fueled by fear? Maybe it might behave better if that emotion was not dominant. Certainly my own fear has sometimes made me act without forethought, like taking Joanna. I should have retrieved her in a way that disguised my involvement. The enemy is slaying everyone in its path, not a simple kill like I might do, but savage. Does it enjoy the terror of its victims? I think it does. How repellent.
While I was not in contact with it long enough to be sure, perhaps a diagnosis of fear is not quite accurate. Perhaps the dominant emotion was hate. Yes, hate. An all-consuming hatred. Why?
I excel at analyzing people, from afar and from within, but thinking about the enemy’s dark nature is so uncomfortable. Wiping my brow with my sleeve, I find that I am soaked in sweat. It is not hot under the sun, just the reaction of my new body to stress. Perhaps there is a better approach. The enemy is like me. I thought I was alone, but I am not. Reason suggests that our origins may be similar. Is there an answer in my own past?
My true memories are encoded in a way that I do not understand. It certainly is not physical. The memories are so complete in every detail that no brain could actually hold them all. They contain much joy and much misery. I have always avoided remembering too much—the details overwhelm me and I cannot see the shape of the beach because the grains of sand are too overwhelming. But I cannot continue to avoid my memories. I must regress backwards as far as I can go.
Closing my eyes, I begin to dredge up the specters of the past. My life and my memories are as fragmented as my nature. Lengthy journeys, short episodes, long relationships, and quick encounters, all come together in a narrative that reflects what I am.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The present is fast-time; the past is slow-time. My memories slowly unreel before me. The slower pace allows me to more fully understand them than when I lived them.
Certain highlights provide guideposts on my journey when I think of this turbulent century. The awe I felt when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, the joy at the end of World War II, the exhaustion at the end of the Great War, and a fascination with new technology. The first time that I saw a long line of black Model T automobiles in a progressing state of assembly in Henry Ford’s massive plant in Detroit, it astonished me with the scale of the effort. The first time flying in an airplane exhilarated me in a way that cannot be conveyed to people who have grown up knowing that machines can make people fly. The explosion of population was bewildering and somewhat intimidating. One feels smaller when one is a part of six billion, instead of part of only one billion. People everywhere, loving, living, hurting.
People have always soiled their home, but the demands of billions began to tear at the ecological foundation and so the Cassandras of science raised their wail of doom. The images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrified me to a more profound degree than I had ever experienced. I had seen too much, had known the inner drives of too many people, to believe that such a weapon could be kept caged. Here we are, more than a half a century later and the atom has not again been used in anger. More than anyone else, I am astonished. Perhaps people are maturing.
The more important part of my memories is the people who have touched my life; or I touched theirs, hopefully for the better. Jenny in Toronto thirty years ago, who finally broke from her compulsion to marry men like her abusive father. Daniel in Austin, only a decade ago, whose first words to me were, “I’d shake your hand, but it’s full of worms right now.” The new miracle drugs managed to calm his paranoid schizophrenia.
There are little traumas within the lives of individuals and bigger traumas that scare nations. During the time that Europe consumed the lives of its young men, we called it the Great War. Only later did we realize that we had to rename it the First World War.
The time was the late spring of 1918. War had raged across Europe for the last three and half years, toppling dynasties, and consuming the lives of men with voracious abandon. Germany faced famine at home, and the Allies took new heart at the sight of doughboys coming from America and marching into battle with the enthusiasm of the naive. With the capitulation of Russia only months earlier, the war had entered the end game.
Amid such misery I did what I could to help. My current host was Baron Gustav von Hof, the sole survivor of an old, obscure Junkers family from Prussia. Gustav had served as my host for twenty-two years. I took him when he was only fifteen.
When I met Gustav my previous host was dying. The cancerous tumor visibly bloated my girth. Desperate, I was seeking a new host and it so happened that I visited a military finishing school as part of my work as a Catholic priest. The Germans called such schools gymnasiums, which only confuses non-German readers. I was there to receive the confessions of those young men who were Catholic. The gymnasium was a model of order, the students sitting quietly and alertly at their desks in sharp uniforms. The linear rows of desks