The Sins of the Reaper - 11

As I walked through the surrounding trees, I moved almost silently, the way I was taught in a former life. Staying away from the sight line along the ridges, I also avoided the tangled wait-a-bits growing in the valley below along the creek bed.

After three hours passed I heard a drone overhead but made no effort to hide. They were equipped to detect heat-signatures thirty years ago when I was still using them. Lord only knows what they can do now.

If you can be seen, you can be killed.

Forty-five minutes later, I came to the fence line outside an old mortar range, the U.S. Goverment Property - No Trespassing signs prominently displayed. But the signs were yellow with age when I was still a soldier and the years had not improved them.

I followed the fence for a few hundred meters till arriving at a section crushed by a fallen tree and entered the old range. Pausing, I took a deep breath as if I might still smell the cordite from the ancient munitions. But the only odor hanging in the still air was the rotten tree that crushed the fence in some forgotten year past.

My senses awakened memory instead, a voice whispering in my ears from the distant past. ‘The novice must begin with shu, the Sensei demonstrating the correct form and the student imitating, repeating each motion exactly as taught, without deviation from the original.'

The memory brings a cold sweat to the surface of my brow, even long after the initial remembering, the emotion of it clinging to my psyche, the seeds leading to the recollection sown weeks before when a beautiful new tenant moved into our apartment building.

Our hallway was generally abandoned when one departed for work at night, quiet and dark when I used to leave a little before midnight for my nightly walk to the bakery, and empty and bright at ten the following morning when I returned. But within a day of her arrival, it seemed I could not leave or enter the building without seeing her on the landing or in the hallway, almost as if she was trying as hard to be seen as I was to remain unseen.

Then one morning as I finished a late breakfast a sharp knock announced her arrival at my door.

“Hi … I’m El.” She told me brightly. “I locked myself out of my apartment, do you mind if I use your phone to call the super?” I was too embarrassed to ask if she forgot her smart phone as she removed her darkened cheaters, her deep and penetrating gaze a striking contrast to the youthful, unlined appearance of her face – almost as if newly born – her silver hair the only other evidence that she might be older than she appeared.

But it was her eyes that drew my own frank and astonished stare, abruptly remembering a penetrating gaze from deeper within my past then I had ever yet remembered before, my face flushing in sudden embarrassment as I directed her to the phone.

Distractedly returning to the kitchen, I walked carelessly close to the edge of the intervening doorframe and jammed my elbow, a tiny steel ball popping suddenly from beneath the skin and bouncing twice before rolling across the floor trailing crimson ooze.

Like two disparate threads trailing from separate corners of the same carpet, the memory of Lilly Paquette kissing me goodbye and the martial arts training on the exercise field suddenly flooding my consciousness together.

'With practice and dedication the movements become second nature,' the Sensei continued, 'eventually transitioning to ha – innovation a natural outgrowth of repetitive and perfected motion.’

Picking the tiny sphere up with a trembling hand it seemed briefly as if I had never forgotten my past at all, Lilly kissing me goodbye as I stood stiffly in my uniform at the airport, her hand briefly rubbing the back of my closely shaved head, an unexpected history waiting for me to jar it loose from the periphery of consciousness much as the small bit of metal from an IED was unexpectedly jarred from my elbow.

But where was the memory of the causative event? If it once existed it had long since departed, its familiars reborn in the world of the subliminal, experience imprisoned in the metaphor and symbol of my dreams, half a lifetime commandeered and reinvented by myth. It seemed my body and subconscious remembered even if I did not. But what did they remember?

“Are you the man without a past?” my new neighbor asked me.

Turning, I stared at her crossly as she gazed innocently back, “Not remembering my past is not the same as not having one,” I had whispered as if only to myself.

I died in Bethlehem long ago, the explosion ending my life as surely as if I had never lived at all. Begin your story anew, someone once said, and I did – the epiphany taking my breath away when the doctor in the burn ward asked me who I was. I was not a blank slate – no amnesiac ever truly is.

A single image of a woman’s face was burned into my memory, her lips moving soundlessly as I strained to hear her, a tower of flames filling the darkened sky like a terrible, crashing wave. Was it Bea who I remembered or Lilly? Even now after the terrible memories in Dr Portnari's chamber, I'm still not sure.

The doctors told me my memories might one day return. And as the weeks passed a single name attached itself to my psyche, bits and pieces of a few months in my life slowly returning. In this way Bea was either a creation of my subconscious or remembered – I’ll likely never know for sure. Thirty years ago, when I left the hospital, I might have as easily been Callaghan as Candide.

Who I am now is more a reflection of that handful of seconds in Bethlehem than the forgotten decades preceding it. Even after countless cosmetic surgeries, facial reconstruction, corneal transplants, and the surgical implant of someone else’s teeth, it is difficult to see beyond my own brute ugliness … as if the forgotten inner man is as repulsive of aspect within as I remain without.

But having finally learned my story, I yearn to tell it to the world, words bubbling up from within that still seem foreign and hard, and yet the strange desire remains to shout it from the rooftops.

El was the one who finally broke the resultant silence. “Would you like to remember?”

I sat down that morning at my table heavily, still holding the bloody steel ball tightly between thumb and forefinger, but somehow could not open my lips to answer, my consciousness still deeply moved by the fresh memory of Lilly’s remembered kiss.

Begin your story anew, Bea uttered prophetically, but in some unremembered life I lost the connecting threads still holding it together, daily awakening in a foreign and listless land where the past was little more than a feebly remembered dream. I did not know how to mourn the loss of it without hating the one who forgot and so hating the women he had forgotten.

In what distant life might I find a tenth of the feeling I once knew when Lilly clasped me in her arms? Do I have to feel again – isn’t it enough to believe?

Bea’s disappearance was an accident of fate. Mine on the other hand was a deliberate act, the gift of anonymity an opportunity to begin a new life and create myself anew, an opportunity to flee something so terrible that for thirty years it could not be remembered.

I can’t honestly say I entirely regretted the opportunity. Would you like to remember? That morning, I wasn’t sure if I did. But as I looked downward at the bloody steel ball still between my fingers an unexpected voice suddenly returned.

‘Shu ha ri … this is the way of the warrior.’

I remembered crouching with the others in the sawdust in a semi-circle around him and wiping the sweat from my mouth, the taste of salt lingering on my tongue. The trainer looked enigmatically into my eyes as he spoke, but I did not turn away, latent energy from his voice hanging potently in the air surrounding us.

‘True mastery,’ his voice finally whispered, ‘only a very few ever attain … even if one studies for a lifetime. Transcending form is the aspiration of ri, movement directed not by conscious thought, but by harnessing unseen energy from within and without.’ Pressing his heart with one hand the trainer gestured into empty air with the other. ‘Shu ha ri … this is the way of the warrior.’

Sitting in my kitchen wordlessly as El stood silently by, his remembered words briefly opened a small window within my consciousness to my true past, the soldier within recognizing the tiny remnants of a weapon that once incapacitated him on a forgotten battlefield long ago and in so remembering remembered the man who trained him to make war.

The dreams that seemed for so many years disconnected from my present life were suddenly relevant, a puzzle to painstakingly reassemble rather than empty, meaningless noise; a phantasmal history of decades consumed by training and war, the youthful warrior within them gradually growing older even as I grow older – trapped within a forgotten life that does not fade and seemingly cannot die.

But am I an archeologist that I might envisage ancient fossils reanimated with flesh any more than I might decode the symbols of my unconscious in order to reassemble a lost life?

“I work for someone who can help you remember.”

“How?” I had whispered.

“Come and see,” she answered quietly, placing her card on my table before turning to leave. Dr. Portinari’s Memory Chamber, L. Piacenti – Technician.

That was the beginning of the return of my past. The day after I met El, I hungered to immerse the totality of my being in memory. I longed to gaze beyond the mirrored confines of my earthly flesh, willing that the universe should surrender its mysteries, unfolding the secrets of a realm beyond all imagining, penetrating the amnesia veiling the truth and finally awakening me from my deadly, unfeeling slumber.

I worked in that bakery for over twenty-five years, night work protecting against memories never truly remembered, shielding me from a terrifying specter who returned only in the deep, unconscious stillness of night.

In the deadly magic hour before the rising of the sun, I guarded myself from an unknowable past with the soothing repetition of a dozen different tasks, producing artisan breads, fancy dinner rolls, raised donuts, and Danish so fragile and tender they fall apart in your hands and melt in your mouth.

Thirty-five years before I was young and tall and strong as I marched across the ceremony field, a killer in my imagination if not my heart, but I didn’t know what killin’ really meant … at least not then. But I suspect my trainer knew … for all the harmony of his words and gestures.

Staring from the wood line's edge at the surrounding waist high grass, I smile grimly, realizing that I look forward to the coming confrontation.

If you are wise, you will rain Hell fire from above.

"But you are not wise," I mutter aloud. You had the chance to kill me and left your calling card instead. Oh, yes, I remember now. I remember a different, more ruthless trainer.

I remembered you, Reaper. Do you know what I can do now? Come and see....