CHAPTER SIX
Chón Tong Kam Thai restaurant
2018 CE
“So I’ll have that revision finished by Tuesday,” Elzbietá said as the waiter removed their soup bowls and slid her favorite grilled prawns in front of her. “I’m a little worried about my reliance on the Bellinger memo, though. I think there’s clear internal evidence that it didn’t all originate with him, but there’s no proof, and I don’t want to force the evidence to support my thesis.” She smiled quirkily. “Among other things, I think my thesis advisor would have a little something to say if I started cooking the books!”
“I imagine he would,” Benjamin replied. “Fortunately, I’m not him anymore.”
“Fortunate in so many ways,” Elzbietá agreed with a much warmer smile, and he smiled back, then reached across the table to lay his hand on hers.
He’d made a lot of progress over the last six or seven months, he thought. In fact, he’d be returning to the university next week. He was grateful for the way Chancellor O’Hearn had gone to bat for him, arranging an extended leave of absence while the assistant chairman of the department filled in for him. Seamus O’Hearn was one of the very few people who knew the truth—or some of the truth, at least—about the reason he’d needed that leave of absence. The chancellor was a good man and a loyal friend, but Benjamin hadn’t told even him everything. Only one person in the universe knew the full truth, and she was sitting across the table from him.
A shiver went through him, and her hand turned under his, clasping it tightly. Her blue eye softened, and she cocked her head in the gesture he’d come to know so well.
“It’s okay,” he told her quickly. “Just…an echo.”
“Just an echo?” she repeated.
“Yep.” He nodded just a bit more firmly than was probably justifiable, but the darkness in her eye retreated and he smiled at her while he tried to understand how he’d gotten so lucky.
Elzbietá was his rock. He’d been attracted to her more strongly than to anyone since Miriam even before what both of them thought of as The Day, but he’d never imagined how important to him she would actually become. And that was because he’d never imagined how strong a person she truly was, he thought now, trying to think of anyone else who would have reacted the way she had when The Day hit him. Not just at the time, either. How many people who really knew what had happened to him could have concluded that he was anything except insane?
That question took on a certain added point because Benjamin wasn’t certain that he wasn’t. Sherman Braxton, his psychologist, said he didn’t think Benjamin was, and most of the time, Benjamin believed him. The problem was that Benjamin couldn’t think of a better term for someone who’d imagined an entirely different world, not just an alternate personality or a single isolated delusion. But Braxton seemed more fascinated than anything else. He’d insisted that the critical thing was learning to cope with the consequences, not agonizing over what had happened or looking for some kind of silver bullet to make the false memories go away. And at least, he’d pointed out, Benjamin had no doubt as to which ones were false. It wasn’t as if he was out of touch with reality, or as if he didn’t have plenty of other people—his parents, his brother and his sisters and their kids, and especially Elzbietá—to keep him centered and grounded. He knew where he was, what he was doing, and every one of his…false memories was safely in the past and falling farther behind with every day. It wasn’t as if his brain was continuing to manufacture additional memories.
He didn’t much care for what the memories he did have might say about his subconscious, though. The “past” in those memories—the memories of the person he’d decided to think of as not-Benjamin—was grim and ugly in so many ways, and not just because of what had happened in that world’s 1940s and 1950s. That was bad enough to cause anyone nightmares, but the consequences downstream—the “Cold War,” the creation of nuclear arsenals capable of destroying all life on Earth, international terrorism on a scale that beggared the imagination—were almost worse. The odd thing was that not-Benjamin hadn’t been crushed by that ugliness. Maybe it was because that was the only world he’d ever known, and maybe it was because that world wasn’t really as ugly as Benjamin thought it was.
And maybe the fact that it came entirely out of my own subconscious, and would certainly make most people question my sanity, might also have a little something to do with how…distasteful I find it, he reflected.
And it wasn’t as if reality didn’t have its own grim moments. The Brazil-Argentina War, for example. At least in not-Benjamin’s world, only two atomic weapons had ever actually been used. The real world hadn’t been quite that kind, although at least its nuclear arsenals had been far smaller than the ones he had imagined. On the other hand, maybe it would have been better if they had been bigger. Maybe not-Benjamin’s doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction” might actually have worked…and Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires might still exist.
He’d never know about that, of course, and the whole idea had struck him as even crazier than most of the nightmares not-Benjamin had imagined. But at least in not-Benjamin’s world, the woman Benjamin loved hadn’t been savagely wounded flying fighter escort for the UN-sponsored strike to take out the Mato Grasso missile complex before still more millions died. Her air group had blown a hole through the Brazilian Air Force in a massive, running dogfight that had cost her seven of her own pilots. She’d been credited with three victories on the way in—more probably six, according to her wingman, and two more on the way out, but her own cameras and onboard computer hadn’t survived—and there were those who questioned the human cost her people and their UN companions had paid. But getting in with the manned bombers had let them take out the bases without using nukes of their own—and killing several hundred thousand more human beings—at the cost of forty-one aircraft and sixty-two aircrew. Elzbietá had almost made it sixty-three…and he knew she would have counted the price a bargain even if she hadn’t made it.
The death toll from the nuclear strikes which had finally provoked the UN-mandated invasions had approached seventy-five percent of his imaginary “Holocaust,” but those deaths were different, somehow. They’d happened…so quickly, in a single spasm of madness, the Rio de Janeiro strike in retaliation for the attack on Buenos Aires. The murders in his nightmares had gone on for years, as part of a grim, horrible, methodical, assembly-line effort to exterminate entire peoples as if they’d been so many vermin. God knew anti-Semitism in the real world had been bad enough in the 1930s, especially in Germany. His family knew that better than most. But what did it say about him that he could even imagine a world in which something like the “Final Solution” could have been embraced by any civilized nation? And that didn’t even consider millions of other victims his imaginary version of the Nazis had inflicted outside the “extermination camps,” or things like the Cambodian massacres in Southeast Asia, genocide in Africa, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, and God alone knew how many dead in “the Cultural Revolution.” If that had been a real possibility, then thank God the Yenan Raid took out Mao Zedong when it did!
He released Elzbietá’s hand, sitting back to let the waiter deposit his Penang curry in front of him, and reached for his chopsticks. He wielded them deftly and felt Elzbietá’s eye on him as he did. He knew what she was thinking. Benjamin Schröder had never learned to use chopsticks; not-Benjamin Schröder had learned that, however, and he suspected the fact that actual motor skills seemed to have transferred from hallucination into reality bothered her more than she was prepared to admit to him. Or possibly even to herself.
It certainly bothered him more than he was prepared to admit to anyone…even himself.
“So, you’re looking forward to getting back into harness, I presume?” Elzbietá said after a moment, watching him apply far too much fish sauce to his curry.
“Absolutely,” he assured her, only a very little more firmly than he actually felt. “I’ve been sitting around long enough, love. Mind you, a few good things have come out of this”—he smiled warmly at her—“but I really need to get back to work. That’s what Sherman’s been saying for weeks now, you know.”
“Easier for him to say than for you,” she shot back tartly, thumping her artificial left hand on the table for emphasis. Then she made herself smile and shook her head. “Sorry! You don’t need me mother-henning you. And you’re both right, I know that. You do need to get back to work. I just—”
She broke off, waving that same left hand in a semiapologetic gesture, and he smiled again.
“Just that you don’t like the thought of my having another…episode, let’s say, without you there to catch me?” he said warmly, and she bobbed a brief nod.
That might just have been the most astounding single aspect of this astonishing woman, he thought. Anyone could have seen he was having some sort of fit, some sort of seizure, some…spasm of madness. And almost any “anyone” faced with that would have headed for the nearest exit, if only to find someone “better qualified” to deal with it. But Elzbietá Abramowski wasn’t wired that way. She’d seen someone in trouble, and she’d done the only thing someone like her could have done…which didn’t include “not my job.”
And it hadn’t hurt any that she’d grappled with demons enough of her own. He hadn’t realized—then—just how brutally damaged her body really had been when her shot-up F-21 crash-landed and exploded on the flight deck of USS Vladivostok after the Mato Grasso Strike. It was a sign of her true inner strength that she hadn’t tried to hide the scars of so much reconstructive surgery from him, but the strength to accept and reveal physical scars paled beside the strength it had taken to admit the depth of her own PTSD to him. And she’d done it at least in part to help him cope with his own confusion and terror. She’d shared her struggle with him, like a soldier lending a wounded squad mate a shoulder to lean on.
When that first terrible spasm had released him—flung him back onto a beach of brutal confusion to wheeze and shudder like a goldfish drowning in oxygen—she’d been there. She’d held him, listened to his gasping incoherence. She might deny it now, but at the time she had to have thought he was completely insane, but he could never have guessed that from her voice, her expression, her arm around him as he pressed his face into her shoulder. And that arm, and that voice, were the true reasons he hadn’t lapsed into outright insanity. There was no question in his mind about that.
“Is Doctor Chalmers ready to hand the chair back over to you?” she asked in an obvious effort to change the subject.
“She is. I’ve asked her to stay on as the chairman of your dissertation committee, though.” He smiled just a bit slyly at her. “Under the circumstances, I think it might not be completely unreasonable for someone to question my ability to remain fully and truly impartial about the quality and originality of your work.”
“Now why should anyone think anything of the sort?” she asked, rounding her eye at him, and he chuckled.
“Can’t imagine,” he said. “Maybe it’s the fact we’re getting our mail at the same address these days?”
“You know, I never thought of that,” she said innocently as the toes of her right foot slid slowly up and down his calf under the table. “Should I assume that you have designs upon my virtue now that you’ve plied me with prawns and tom kha gai?”
“Madam, I am shocked—shocked!—that you could possibly suspect me of such depravity and wickedness.”
“Oh, too bad.” She took her foot from his calf, her eye laughing at him. “In that case, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go home with someone else.”