Remembrance Day – Part Three (Deleted Stories)

With a sudden thud and loud clang, the metal door of the Mentists office flew open and Dr. Ill
the mentist stumbled slowly out into the waiting room, fell into a seat, picked up a magazine wearily at random from the waiting room table, flicked to an advert for a commemorative coin, lost consciousness, fell from his seat onto the floor and died, blood seeping from the gaping bullet wound in the centre of his forehead.

The burly nurse screamed and then panic exploded within the little waiting room; everyone but
Herbert and the dope smoking beatnik rushing to push their way out through the swing doors of the exit.

And then Herbert saw her, Marissa X, holding some mime object in both hands; perhaps that thing she had been assembling outside on the street and, as she aimed the invisible object and fired it at the plasma screen above his head, shattering the mug shot picture of herself, Herbert realized that
it was a mime gun that she was holding but one that, unmistakably, fired real ammunition.

“Either I have flipped, man or that chick has got an air rifle that is made out of real air”, said Mr Krakowski, cowering beneath his polyprop chair.

But then the clown faced girl kissed Herbert on the lips, her clown make-up rubbing off on his face and, in that kiss was her whole life story. The story of a foetus gestating within a glass tank; of a circular bronze room called The House Of Rumour where she and other little, telepathic or telekinetic children had been wired up to a large machine so that they could read the minds
of ordinary American citizens and of the day when rebels shattered the walls of that prison
and freed the children, the leader of those rebels a remarkable man who had lived for
five thousand years.

“I’ve prayed for death for so long”, he heard himself telling a young, mute but telepathic girl,
“But in this century there is technology that can wipe away a 5 thousand year old memory.
It’ll be like being born again and living a normal life. I’ve even chosen a new name that I think
sounds more humdrum and boring than Randolph; Herbert Briggs”.

The mute girl was crying then too; real, not painted tears but he hadn’t listened when she’d urged
him telepathically to stay.

“I have to forget everything”, he said, “It’s my chance to feel mortal again”.

Then, it was as if a large crack had suddenly opened within that dam that he had placed across
his memory. The dreams had only been droplets but now 5 thousand years of remembering
came flooding through; everything except his birth and those nine months he had spent in the womb.

It almost made him too weak to stand but now was not the time for weakness; now was the time to remember that this was not the America that the Founding Fathers had envisaged but the brainchild of the Nazi’s who had infiltrated the highest echelons of the American government after WWII, a dangerous place to be if you were someone like him.

Outside he could hear the howling of Wolf cars, those sleek, black mag-lev racing cars of the American Gestapo with sirens that always made a strange sound like the baying of hungry wolves and his mute clown friend was rummaging through her black top hat; pulling out and discarding a number of peculiar items; a deck of cards; an ivory handled walking stick, a vase of chrysanthemums, a terrified looking rabbit and the coin which Herbert had flipped into it earlier until she found a semi-automatic pulse rifle with infra-red night sight that she then handed to him nonchalantly.

“Hey, hey! I don’t dig all this crazy second amendment shit”, said Mr Krakowski, peering out from
under his chair like a snail from its shell, “How about we hit them with some heavy protest songs instead?”.

“I don’t think those people outside are music lovers, Mr Krakowski”, said Herbert, cocking the rifle and remembering that he had handled every kind of firearm from a flintlock to a high-powered
lazer cannon.

Then Marissa yanked an invisible pin from an invisible hand grenade with her clenched teeth,
pitching it overarm through the window of the mentists office and out towards the waiting cars of the Gestapo and they all heard the ringing of shattering glass followed by a loud explosion that hurled Herbert’s mind back, momentarily, to the battle of the Somme, scrambling out of the trenches knowing that he might be the only one among his company to reach the other side
of No-Man’s Land.

“But this is not then, this is now”, he thought, “And sometimes we have to fight”.

And then his eyes opened and it was a long time in the future, he was lying in bed
and the woman beside him was not Marissa; Marissa had died of old age decades
ago and the woman beside him was fighting for a different cause against a different
oppressor.

He got up from bed and walked out onto the balcony of their bedroom where
he could hear the waves constantly lapping upon the shore and up above were the same
bright stars he could remember from skies of centuries gone by,

“How do you do it?”, he asked the stars.