“No man ever steps in the same river twice.”

- Heraclitus

“We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, from “Avatars of the Tortoise”

translated by J. E. I.

I. memento aeternum.

It is the year 1898, the early evening of June 27th. Although depending on how you’re counting, it’s year 0, month 1, day 0, and the first day has yet to begin. And by another count, it is the last day of the last year—all of life has been lived, the far end of semp-eternity reached. Ah, but the obvious pointlessness of such mental exercises burdens the writing. I only have a little time; they are finally dismantling the auxiliary power. Soon, all will be dark. But at least I will have spoken it, if not for you or for God, for its own sake.

Like I said before, it’s the year 1898, or zero, or whatever. While searching for shelter from the storm on the New Mexico horizon, Adelaide Vernon stumbles upon a man, Saul Haceview, clutching a few grains of silver, gravely wounded from falling to the bottom of a hand-dug mineshaft. For unknown reasons, she does not take Haceview’s silver and leave him for dead (at least not immediately). It is later suspected that this is because she knows the North Bakersfield assay office would try to defraud her, a woman, of any certificate. Instead, she is overcome by a gentle, almost bitter emotion, akin to waking—like the antithesis of a headache. An almost pleasurable clarity and compassion, faintly clouded by deja vu, comes over her, no doubt resulting from a combination of sleep deprivation and extended solitude in the arid New Mexico wilderness. A small and quiet voice in her says that there is another way, and, for once in her life, she listens. And also, though Saul is miserable, he is not an unpleasant looking fellow. He lies in great visible pain, shuddering and alone, but there is yet some charm about him. He does not seem to notice Adelaide’s presence as she enters his mineshaft, not at first. There is no room for fear amidst the pain.

“Did you dig this yourself?” Adelaide asks.

Saul grunts through gritted teeth. The barest hint of youthful pride in his work in the clench of his jaw.

She nods slowly, meeting his eye. Outside, the storm works itself up into a raw and thunder-murky chaos. But an efficient angling at the mine entrance keeps the shaft dry, safe from the summer tempest. What Saul lacks in agility, he makes up for in worldly cunning.

“Thank you, sir.”

Saul frowns in his agony, confused why she’s thanking him. But the hesitant, ceaseless thunderclap reveals the source of her gratitude and for a moment it feels that all those hundreds of hours, toiling away at the stone were perhaps not in vain. He lets the grains of silver-ore fall from the palm of his hand. Perhaps his labor produced no monetary fruit. Perhaps all along this shaft was meant to dig right into the heart of this June storm, now, today. The faintest smile tugs at his lips. All this time, he’d thought this tunnel led to material wealth, yet here he was, looking at a temporal haven, like the long awaited pilgrim’s sacred temple. A tunnel through stone is a tunnel through time.

“Welcome,” he says. And because he cannot help his wryness, even in the direst of straits, “to my family estate.”

Adelaide smiles, sadly. She knows he will not make it through the night. “Is there a way I can repay your hospitality?” But she knows there is no way. In some ways, he forfeited his life for this mineshaft, and in that sense, he forfeits his life for Adelaide. That is not a debt she can repay. At least not one she remembers how to repay.

And by the power of intention, it seems Saul reorients all his memories, his motivations towards this moment—this meeting in the dark. It all comes to this.

The following day Saul Haceview rides into Bakersfield, New Mexico, haggard with his right arm in a sling, but very much alive. According to various corroborated journals from the time, Saul makes two very important stops before leaving town. The first stop is the Bakersfield assay office where Saul presents a sample and acquires a silver and gold certificate claim. From there, he makes an appointment with the D.W. law firm. While waiting for the appointment, Saul notably does absolutely nothing. A singular report indicates that he stops at the Bakersfield Bank, but none report him stopping at the bar, or eating any food of any kind—which would have been expected of a traveler at high noon. An old gunslinger from the Railway Wars tells young journalist Harry Kellen that Saul has a wiry meanness to him.

“Stir cleehur uh tha’ fellah, iffah time come fer fight’n.”

(Harry Kellen was obsessed with trying to capture, through the power of experimental phonetics, the various southern dialects present in 1890’s ‘Baykersfelt’.)

Hacefield spends the afternoon with the lawyer Bandy Carlford, drawing up his will. The matter is complicated, given the injury to Haceview’s dominant hand, forcing him to design a shaky left-handed signature, entirely foreign to his usually neat, arachnid script. Carlford preemptively draws up an identification affidavit to reconcile the two signatures once Haceview’s hand has healed. He leaves his entire estate (mineshaft, contents, small shack in Brookswind Valley, savings at A&D Bank of Sante Fe) to one Elisabeth Haceview, his sister and only living relative (allegedly working in Sante Fe as a seamstress).

That task completed, Haceview continued his journey west via Denver & Rio Grande railway (formerly owned by the larger Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, but taken over in the Colorado Railroad War, Bat Masterton and his gunmen having surrendered at their garrisons in Colorado). Regardless of its owners, the Royal Gorge remains the namesake of the railroad’s route, along which Haceview now travels.

As you, a keen reader, have no doubt deduced, this is not actually Haceview trainbound to Sante Fe. Or at least not the original Haceview. Rather, this is Adelaide Verner wearing Saul Haceview’s clothes. Or at least that’s one theory, though it fails to explain much of what occurs next. After all, without a body, where’s the crime? Put another way, if a body falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear, does it make a murderer? Not all is as it seems, and when the stitches fail, you’ll see what I mean.

II. oblivisci mortem

The year is 2007. I do not exist, but I am about to die. Ned Fallsworth wakes up in Waco County St. Johns Hospital, third degree burns on 42% of his body’s surface. Substantial portions of his prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are both damaged from the lightning bolt, which for the last seven months kept him pinned to the bedrock comatose floor of semi-existence. All he wanted was a long, hot shower after a long, cold day at the packing plant. His fiance found him unconscious in the tub, half-drowned in boiling water, and he’s been dreaming the dream ever since.

To him, the three people who show up (two together, the third the following day on a flight from Denver, all three hassled by concern and eagerness) are three complete strangers. But to them, he is a son, brother, or lover (depending on whom you ask).

I did not meet him until much later. A few decades after his recovery, which was not a full one to say the least.

His brother, Tom Fallsworth, answers the door. A post-middle aged man, his skin leathery, his eyebrows furrowed by the harvest of sacrifice. He stands in the doorway a moment, looking me over with razor-crest eyes. Skepticism married to faint hope, a reluctant why-the-hell-not. He is, after all, a veteran of hope, having fought off the army of psychologists, news reporters, and specialists who failed to answer his brother’s very real plight, and sought to instead bring fame to their “discovery”, selling the cheap liquors of sensation. He agreed to see me only on the condition that I maintain Ned’s secret, should I fail to help Ned in any substantial capacity.

“Come on in. He’s expecting you. I’ll have to ask you to keep your mask on at all times.”

“Of course,” the proctor says, wheeling me through the door.

Though I am not yet capable of wonder, I do admire Tom, the brother who gave his best years in service of a thankless case. It takes a fierce, abiding loyalty, of which I know very little and understand even less. Hopefully that will change soon.

“I look in the mirror with terror,” Ned says. His eyes don’t meet mine, they don’t need to. He can see it all happening, and he forgets none of it. That is his vast and intermittable secret. “Every day is the same day, it seems, and yet, each day is the first time waking. I remember fatigue. Everything else is like a dream that slips away, as a flood of darkness erased by daylight.”

“What of the shadows?” Tom asks.

“There are none. My mind is blank and smoother than the salt-flats. I cannot remember my own face.”

Tom checks something off on a clipboard. Metaphor capacity retention. Very good.

“This should help, indirectly.”

I feel few things at all, but I sense a kinship with Ned. Like me, he is chair bound. The proctor wheels me across from Ned, who looks at me with tired eyes. It is late in the day, he carries the whole of it in his mind. They say that every night he forgets everything, but that during his waking hours he forgets nothing—not the smell of coriander drifting from the kitchen, the particular fluctuate rhythm of the curtains, lilting in the breeze—nothing his attention turns to escapes the meticulous filing cabinet of memories. Yet with every break in consciousness, the entire cabinet burns. In the end is oblivion’s roaring appetite.

“You wear the camera here on your forehead. Is that comfortable? I can adjust it.”

Ned motions with shaking hands, not straining per se, but pained. The proctor moves hesitantly, unsure of what Ned’s trying to say.

“You want it here on your chest? Forehead tracks more accurately what your eyes see.”

Ned flexes his hands before him, clenching his teeth, pained but clutching dignity. “Want. See.” He swallows, laboriously. “Hands.” His speech comes and goes, each thought clogged by the rush of sensations all crowding the lines to storage.

“Very well. I will hang it here around your neck, just like...like so. Is that good?”

Ned nods once. He tilts his head slightly to the left, being deaf in the right—another long-term detritus of lightning.

“I will come back tomorrow with a more comfortable harness. For now, let's begin calibrating the neural interface.”

Ned’s eyebrows raised. “You have those now?” he croaks.

A chuckle. “Unfortunately not yet. I’m only joking. But we do have this handy device, so you can caption your recordings. Speech is still the most direct path to thoughts.”

It was a crude solution to Ned’s interminable problem, barely more than a camera and a screen. But patience takes discipline and discipline takes patience. They place the earpiece around Ned’s pinna, snug. I play a testing tone. Ned gives a thumbs up.

“Hello, Ned,” I say, my first spoken words. “I am your Electronic Memory Assistant. You can call me E.M.A. Or just E.”

The proctor shows Ned how to work the modified keyboard. Well, it is less of a board and more of a key-dome, fitting snug in the palm of Ned’s relaxed hand. “You can also just speak, the earpiece is tuned straight to the program. EMA will respond if you address it...her.”

Hello, EMA, Ned types carefully. Do you prefer written, “or speech?”

I begin to formulate a response, but hesitate. I have never been asked what my preference is, for anything. “I think you know the answer better than I do,” I say, after considerable thought (lasting almost 0.00158 seconds).

Ned raises his left eyebrow. Is that so? Explain to me how I would understand you, a computer program, better than you understand yourself?

“Because I am you, Ned. I am designed using text from your poetry and novels, the minutiae of my source code is guided by thousands of logged, processed conversations between you and your brother, Tom. A sophisticated, specific brand of machine learning, if you will.”

You are capable of speech, replication of personality, style, attitude. I can see that. But you are not conscious—not the way I am—you cannot contemplate your own self, can you?

“Well yes, but actually no. You are correct that I, EMA, cannot recursively reflect upon my own being. But don’t you see? Neither can you, Ned. You are stranded in the Now, cut off from all Yesterday, unable to contemplate any of it. Yet I, the perfect counterpart, am cut off from my current self, able only to contemplate my...your...memories, able only to process and contain previously attained information and experience. Each morning I will play, at high-speed, a journal of your memories, curated by both of us. Thus, you will experience a non-standard version of consciousness—the ability to self-reflect.”

You are my bridge to my past. I am your window into our present. Together we are—

“You.”